This got me to thinking: What if journalism went on strike for, say, a week? No Boulder Daily Camera, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, no ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN (but Fox can continue because it’s not journalism) for an entire week. No WINS radio or KQED. No Time or Newsweek, and no Associated Press dispatches. ESPN? It goes dark. All sources of news, investigation, and non-fiction narrative — off the air, off the Internet and off the newsstands for a week.
What would Google News and all the other blood-sucking news aggregators do? Where would bloggers like me get their bloviational fodder? How would citizens know that a deadly new strain of pandemic flu had just broken out in their local high school? How would they hear that the Taliban in Pakistan had just stolen a nuclear weapon and were threatening to blow up New York City?
After thinking about this for awhile, a really scary thought occurred to me:
What if no one cared?
And even worse:
What if no one even noticed?
This thing has 2 Comments
Tom,
Those “blood-sucking aggregators” drive traffic to newspaper sites–and your blog.
Keith:
Yes, and those aggregators also suck the advertising revenue from the newspaper sites, turning them into zombies.