Me and my soon-to-be-unemployed friends in newspapers

You know me as Sanjay Bhatt, a student in this class. I'm also a journalist, and as you see with the impending shutdown of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the specter of bankruptcy at The Seattle Times, there is a very real possibility I will join the millions of Americans who are lining up for unemployment benefits and flocking to job fairs.

The New York Times published a story on its site today about the economy shedding more than 650,000 jobs last month. Here's a few paragraphs:

Another 651,000 jobs disappeared from the American economy in February, the government reported Friday, as the unemployment rate soared to 8.1 percent — its highest level since 1983.

The latest grim scorecard of contraction in the American workplace largely destroyed what hopes remained for an economic recovery in the first half of this year, and added to a growing sense that 2009 is probably a lost cause.

Most economists now assume that the American fortunes will not improve before near the end of the year, as the Obama administration’s $787 billion emergency spending program begins to wash through the economy.

While I certainly count myself among those who feel blessed to have a job for now, I am also aware that once newspapers shut down, they don't come back. Unlike a factory that can resume making widgets once demand picks up again, the business model that supports serious journalism in America is broken and isn't coming back.

Online, serious journalism is in danger. Yes, you went to the NYTimes.com site to skim a few graphs and post them on a blog (like I just did), but the NYTimes.com's cost to produce that story on its website included salaries (reporter, editor, copy editor, graphic designer, maybe a lawyer's time if it's a potentially libelous story), infrastructure (rent, utilities, web server) and other costs that us bloggers don't bear.

Here's the problem: Aggregators like Google and the Huffington Post, which carries snippets of the story, monetize that reporting. So the NYTimes.com gets to carry all the expense and only a fraction of the revenue, while the bloggers get to carry much of the revenue and virtually none of the expense.

We'll just have to wait and see what happens in places like San Francisco, Denver and other cities where newspapers are going out of business to see what all those bloggers are going to write about.

Or JUST SEE THIS CARTOON for a vision of the future without serious journalism.

http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2009/03/03/tomo/

How about a nickel for my thoughts?