Will journalism go the way of the newspaper?

Three media conglomerates reported huge drops in net revenue for the first quarter of 2008, with Lee Enterprises, Inc. as the loss leader with an 84-percent drop in net income. Lee, McClatchy and E.W. Scripps are all reporting cost-cutting strategies: staff cuts, cutting newsprint consumption and reducing other expenses. They all blame declining ad revenue and the economy and predict no improvements to their bottom lines until the overall economy improves.

Leading the way in cost reductions, as usual, is staff cuts. Most notably cuts will probably be made in newsrooms, resulting in less original content. A new survey showed almost 70 percent of small newspapers cut staff by between 1 and 20 percent, with 49 percent of the papers cutting between 10-19 percent of staff. Staff cuts at 76 percent of big papers were between 1-20 percent with most (54 percent) of papers cutting 10-19 percent of staff.

Despite the cuts, editors continue to say strong journalism and a good business model are the keys to survival: “Excellent journalism, strong investment to stay on the cutting edge of technology and aggressive marketing of the product,” said Gage, special projects editor at Journal-World.

Reporters will be expected now to take up the slack. They are expected to write content for print, web, special web sites, television stations the paper might own or be affiliated with, web television and instant news services, packages of brief news stories for Internet subscribers through the day. This in addition to taking her own pictures or video and recording sound, editing pictures and content, posting and uploading for dissemination, fact checking and maybe even page layout.

Editors surveyed said they were already paying the price for the new way of producing news. “I read the stories (in my own paper) today and I see more holes, questions I want answered that are not,” lamented one editor. “I see more stories…that aren’t as well sourced as I prefer.”

So, is this the journalism we prefer? Is this acceptable? Will strong journalism be sacrificed to immediate 24/7 news that might not be true and/or probably doesn’t probe into the nuances that would make the story more clear? I’m afraid so. I’m hoping someone can provide glimmers of hope for the lowly journalist.