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COMMENT
Tens of thousands of journalists and news room workers have been sacked worldwide over the last two years.
Yet most debate continues to be dominated by discussions about the “future of news” - rather than the crisis happening right now.
Ironically, the top Google result leads to a ‘proper’ website www.thefutureofnews.com - which has disappeared.
Future of news on Google returns roughly half a million hits. Future of journalism gets another million or so. Worryingly for print, variations like the future of newspapers get barely 80,000 hits.
Amongst all the blue sky mining, however, the most worrying trend is the lack of local debate surrounding journalism crisis - just 20,000 hits. The more academically inclined are more active, getting some 80,000 hits for the slightly more high brow journalism in crisis.
Slightly more encouraging are some 200,000 hits for world journalism in crisis.
A quick guesstimate suggests the future gets six times as much debate as the current crisis.
Is this realistic?
Unless the causes of the current crisis are investigated with as much effort as possible futures, there may not be much of a future for journalism.
Indeed, such concerns may already be out-of-date.
“Journalism is dead” -- an obvious eyeball grabber -- but even leading academia like the Pew Institute are using the D word.
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