"Media Crisis and Grassroots Response" - by Jordan Flaharty
The media landscape is changing rapidly. As all forms of journalists face massive layoffs, analysts fear that journalism's role as a counterforce against the powerful is in jeopardy. For progressives and radicals working in media, it's important to not only question what format news will come in, but also how to approach our work so it is both accountable and sustainable. While corporations have shown an ever-decreasing interest in funding investigative journalism, independent media is undergoing its own transformation. Part of it is in economic challenges to old methods of distribution, such as rising print costs and postage rates for print publications. But the larger transformation has been in where people turn for news and information.
At least 525 magazines went out of business in 2008, according to mediafinder.com, and even more went under in 2007. The Los Angeles Times has cut nearly half its staff in the last eight years, while the Tribune Company announced that they would trim 500 pages of news each week from their twelve papers. The Miami Herald slashed 370 jobs last year, nearly a third of their workforce, with more cuts announced for this year. Book publishers -- corporate and independent -- have also been announcing staff layoffs and bankruptcies. Many of these reductions happened before the current economic free fall, and there are dire predictions of steeper drops on the horizon. This is not only happening in the US and Europe, but all over the world.
Note EU-Digest: Fortunately we still have the thousands of Mom and Pop run local and regional newspapers and the independent bloggers which are presently the main pillar of a grassroots movement against the complete takeover of the Free Press by large media corporations.
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