Newspapers

I don't know how many people routinely get into arguments about whether the decline of the newspaper is a good or bad thing, but for people who suspect that the failure of newspapers will lead to a net-positive, this article provides some compelling arguments to steal and claim as your own -

Now, a newspaper partisan might argue that reporters’ gatekeeper role was a good thing because, in essence, the reporter had a better understanding of what the reader needed than the reader himself did. I think this is not only paternalistic, but it also misunderstands the role of the front page in local politics. The reason putting something on the front page of the local newspaper could affect the political debate wasn’t that it mobilized otherwise-disengaged citizens. If you put a water board story on the front page, most ordinary citizens are just going to flip to the sports page. Rather, the reason getting on the front page mattered was mostly because before the Internet, there were a lot of people who were interested, but who—thanks to the limitations of the newspaper format—might not otherwise have seen this particular story.

It used to be pretty difficult for insiders to keep track of the issues they card about. Before search engines and RSS feeds, it took a lot of work to comb through newspapers looking for every story relating to a particular subject. This is why large organizations subscribed (and still do) to expensive newspaper-clipping services. The Internet has made life radically easier for the politically active. If I want to know what’s going on in a particular issue I care about—software patents or eminent domain reform, say—I can directly subscribe to RSS feeds related to those subjects. I can set up a Google News alert for my favorite topic, my favorite (or least favorite) politician, or the name of my home town. So the Internet is having two effects that are really opposite sides of a single coin: it’s making it easier for interested citizens to follow the issues they care about, and it’s making it easier for uninterested citizens to ignore the issues they don’t care about. Given that non-engaged citizens have always been little more than deadweight in the political process, I consider this a good thing.