As this weekend ends, three thoughts:
I love living in a country that created a holiday to honor a person who devoted his life to promoting civil rights.
And, as inauguration day approaches, I am reminded to appreciate the fact that I live in a country that has peaceful transitions of government and has managed to keep that concept going for over 200 years.
But, as I view both events, I am also reminded that Thomas Jefferson said, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." I worry about the financial troubles facing the country's newspapers, gradually undermining their ability to do the kind of investigative reporting that makes governments and corporations uncomfortable. While social media like this kind of forum help to offset some of those losses, who is going to pay for the depth of investigation and reporting that has proven so important over the years?
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4 comments:
Great point, Paul, and one that I haven't heard expressed elsewhere in the context of this inauguration.
Well, the Drudge Report comes to mind. Written words don't have to be on paper. Drudge,in the early years of his site, revealed a lot through digital media in a very simple yet efficient way.
Newspapers will have to adapt. Instead, they have to become newspages. Many have already done that well.
Newspapers (the good ones) restrict their opinion to selected pages, unlike Drudge, the Huffington Post and other new media outlets.
I still like to make up my own mind, rather than be told how to think and that is the greatest potential danger from the oss of newspapers in their current form.
A little late to this conversation, but I think the future of investigative journalism is something like ProPublica (www.propublica.org) that specializes in investigative journalism and sells their articles to major publications. The downside, I think, is that a centralized organization like this is going to be more focused on national issues. The local issues will fall to bloggers and individual citizens to try to investigate, which does not quite seem so effective.
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