The New News?

One casualty of the new American economic landscape may be the "old media" companies. Advertising rates have been dropping and circulation has been stale among old-fashioned newspapers without a vibrant web presence. Newsrooms have been cut back across the country. Newspapers still generate the most local news of any media type, I think, so it may be time to reassess where we get our news in general. We are all now local reporters, and we need to start thinking like reporters. We need to get engaged in the big and little stories all around us, and spread the news as best we know how. We can't sit back and let people tell us what's happening around us, we have to go out and find out for ourselves. The newsrooms simply aren't staffed adequately any more. Local TV is content to chase after the sensational stories. The "digging deeper" they do is mostly based on print sources. Now more than ever we need citizen journalists to generate more local stories.