COMM 209: Looking into the crystal ball ... jobs, careers for writers

On the Daily Kos website this week, an analysis of the political blog's sources of information. Interesting. Daily Kos has political axes to grind. It's liberal philosophically, and I'd consider what it does as commentary rather than news. But it draws on a variety of sources.

Most of them aren't newspapers.

But I don't want to turn this into another newspapers-are-dying rant. There's enough of that around already, without my adding to it. I'm more interested when "kos" screenname for the blog's founder ) says:

While newspapers were the most common source of information, they accounted for just 123 out of 628 total original information sources, or just shy of 20 percent. ... [T]his doesn't mean I'm gleefull or happy or even neutral on the sorry state of the newspaper industry and the demise of so many great newspapers. It's always sad to lose a good source of journalism. But we live in a rich media environment, easily the richest in world history, and the demise of the newspaper industry will simply shift much of the journalistic work they did to other media.

The Daily Kos, like so many blogs, needs a copyeditor, by the way. "Gleeful" only has one "l."

Copyediting quibbles aside, he's right when he says we live in "easily the richest [media environment] in history."

In class today, I'm handing out a print article called "Journalism History is Merely a List of Surprises" that was in The Quill, trade magazine for the Society of Professional Journalists, last month.

I posted a couple of quotes to the blog last month (before the article went behind a subscription firewall. Here's a link to that post:

COMM 209: "Life After Newspapers ... if the [print] New York Times disappears, there will still be news."