Ruminations on newspapers and communities

By Martin Langeveld @MartinLangeveld June 14, 2009, 4:25 p.m.

My friend Richard Floyd keeps a blog called Retired Pastor Ruminates. He is a fellow member of the Monday Evening Club of Pittsfield, Mass., to which I presented a paper, previously mentioned here, on the future of newspapers.

Floyd has now conducted and posted an e-mail interview following up on the paper, in which he pursues, and I attempt to answer, a line of inquiry relating to the function of newspapers in holding together communities, and whether the decline of newspapers will have an effect on the well-being of communities.

POSTED June 14, 2009, 4:25 p.m.

Show tags

TWITTER FACEBOOK EMAIL

Sophie Culpepper

The California Google deal could leave out news startups and the smallest publishers

“We don’t know whether or how this nonprofit and its fund will operate, and likely won’t for some months (nonprofit governance is many things, but fast is not one of them).”

Joshua Benton

With an expansion on the way, Ken Doctor’s Lookout thinks it has some answers to the local news crisis

After finding success — and a Pulitzer Prize — in Santa Cruz, Lookout aims to replicate its model in Oregon. “All of these playbooks are at least partially written. You sometimes hear people say, ‘Nobody’s figured it out yet.’ But this is all about execution.”

Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos

Big tech is painting itself as journalism’s savior. We should tread carefully.

“We set out to explore how big tech’s ‘philanthrocapitalism’ could be reshaping the news industry, focusing on countries in the Global South…Our findings suggest an emerging web of dependency between cash-strapped newsrooms and Silicon Valley’s deep pockets.”