You’ll miss it when it’s gone

I’ve been a journalist for a quarter-century. I’ve written and produced news for every medium, from television to magazines, high-brow to low.

(One of my earliest assignments was chronicling Boy George’s antics in London in the mid-1980s…)

Most of my career has been spent in public radio. But if you ask me which newsgathering institution is most essential, most irreplaceable, my answer is simple:

The newspaper.

From the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal right down to our humble but vital Adirondack Daily Enterprise and Malone Telegram, newspapers are (in a word) necessary.

Without them, our democracy (already an imperfect experiment) will enter a new era of uncertainty.

When the history of this era is written, which threat to our society will seem more dire, fundamentalist Muslims in Pakistan or the loss of newspapers?

A lot of new-media advocates say the internet will fill the void. Nonsense.

Newspapers have the institutional capacity — teams of journalists, editors, photographers — to pursue complicated, investigative stories.

They also have firewalls between advertising pressure and editorial content that grant them greater objectivity.

Are newspapers perfect? Of course not. But their demise will leave a void that other news outlets — including public radio — simply aren’t equipped to fill.

Tags: economy