.floatimg-left-hort { float:left; } .floatimg-left-caption-hort { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:300px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-vert { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right:15px; width:200px;} .floatimg-left-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; font-size: 12px; width:200px;} .floatimg-right-hort { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px;} .floatimg-right-caption-hort { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px; font-size: 12px; } .floatimg-right-vert { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px;} .floatimg-right-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; font-size: 12px; } .floatimgright-sidebar { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; border-top-style: double; border-top-color: black; border-bottom-style: double; border-bottom-color: black;} .floatimgright-sidebar p { line-height: 115%; text-indent: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar h4 { font-variant:small-caps; } .pullquote { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 150px; background: url(http://www.dmbusinessdaily.com/DAILY/editorial/extras/closequote.gif) no-repeat bottom right !important ; line-height: 150%; font-size: 125%; border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 1px solid;} .floatvidleft { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatvidright { float:right; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;}
We’ll miss daily newspapers when they’re gone. And lately they seem to be putting their affairs in order.

The Des Moines Register has announced it will lay off workers soon, putting the local paper right in step with what’s going on all over the nation. The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune … they’re all frantically cutting payrolls.

Daily papers don’t appear to have many years left to live as newsprint products, but they’re all determined to be reincarnated on the Web. That might take a lot of praying.

The Milwaukee Business Journal – reporting on woes at that city’s daily Journal Sentinel – quoted a stock analyst: “For every dollar daily newspapers have lost in print revenue, they’ve been able to replace it with only 15 cents in revenue from their Web sites.”

If they hope to survive online, they can’t take everybody with them. It’s the Titanic all over again, and there still aren’t enough lifeboats.

When it comes to timely delivery of serious, breaking news, the change seems to make perfect sense. You don’t have to wait until tomorrow morning to find out what Vladimir Putin is up to. That’s progress, no doubt about it – as long as the instantly available information is accurate.

We’ll adjust to the change in format. What’s worrisome is the likely decline in reporting power. Do the big dailies always get the story right? No. But the online world is guaranteed only to be quicker. With fewer serious journalists around, coverage isn’t likely to be better.

A theory about the wisdom of crowds states that the more input you get, the more likely you are to arrive at the truth. Some people take this to mean that a blogosphere world would be a better-informed world. Well, maybe. Seems like the crowd has done lots of dumb things and bought into a bunch of crazy theories down through history.

If the crowd should happen to let us down this time, we won’t have a throng of experienced reporters standing by. They will have moved on.

The people on newspaper copy desks have devoted an awful lot of time to forcing headlines and stories into little boxes. On the Web, space is not an issue. And folks in the pressrooms and mailrooms have labored endlessly to get results that we produce now with a few keystrokes.

But we’re not using that saved time to produce better journalism. As in farming, technological advances make it possible to produce more with fewer people. The corn is the same as before. Journalism, however, isn’t a commodity. There are good and bad versions.

Unfortunately, most Americans think the bad kind already has won out. Any poll regarding “most trusted” or “most respected” professions places journalists well down the list. Some surveys find people quite willing to accept whatever the people in authority decide, and think journalists should stop looking for other viewpoints.

The key issue is not whether the daily reports are viewed on newsprint or on computer monitors. The question is, what content will we see there?

Yes, the Internet is fantastic. It’s immensely valuable to have instant access to so much information. But there also was value in a lumbering old system that focused the nation’s attention – or the state’s – on a few key news topics every day. It united us, gave us something to discuss and usually set a respectful tone for the debate. As for our own little quirks and obsessions, we didn’t pretend that they were newsworthy.

The National Lampoon, a humor magazine, once ran a phony story about “Me” magazine, perfectly tailored to each individual reader.

The venerable Baltimore Sun is now working on a redesign that will include a features section called “You.”

It’s not a good sign when you reach the point of self-parody.