The San Francisco Chronicle is in danger of shutting down (excerpt from The Guardian):
The San Francisco Chronicle is the latest major US newspaper in financial distress, with owner Hearst Corporation saying the title is threatened with immediate sale or closure, blaming “staggering losses”. In a memo to staff late yesterday, the Chronicle’s chairman and publisher, Frank Vega, blamed the declining economy and slump in advertising revenues for the paper’s problems. ”Despite all of our best efforts as an organisation, the Chronicle continues to show staggering losses each week,” said Vega. ”Recent staff and expense reductions have not stemmed these losses, which are only worsening in the present economy… If we are unable to accomplish these reductions in the immediate future, Hearst Corporation, which owns the Chronicle, has informed us that it will offer the newspaper for sale or close it altogether.”
We still get a newspaper everyday and would be very unhappy to loose it. We also see the news on TV. We feel that every TV newscast is somewhat slanted except for PBS. We think somee of the bigger papers from cities the size of Seattle, Minneapolis, etc. could hold their readers if they went for more community news and local business profiles, etc. , along with the news reported in a more balanced way.
I agree with you that TV news is very biased and much of it is worthless. I don’t get the paper edition of the SF Chronicle here in SF, but I do get the Financial Times (paper edition). I read the Chronicle when I am in a cafe or I read it online.
I am really worried that the kind of investigative journalism required for rooting out corrupt officials, dangerous business practices, financial fraud and more, will be nearly impossible to do because the news organizations that fund the journalists to perform these time-consuming investigations, won’t be around.
This would be a huge loss for society and create an extremely dangerous situation where no one can trust anyone anymore, and where honest business people and politicians suffer because the crooks get away with everything — exactly the problem with the loss of faith in financial institutions and investment companies. See where that has led us today – the collapse of the financial system.