We Need More Great Journalists.....

.....Less Newspapers.

Great read:

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

“Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.”

Newspapers are a dying breed because the quality of journalists is garbage. Fix that problem and you are 50% of the way there to fix the newspaper problem. The best financial journalists are in fact bloggers like Naked Capitalism, Credit Writedowns, and Mish. These people would never be hired by the newspaper establishment because they tell the truth.