The former Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal often said he couldn’t imagine a world without The Times. Perhaps we should start.
Michael Hirschorn erzählt in der End Times betitelten Geschichte in The Atlantic vom Niedergang des Qualitätsjournalismus in Print. Dabei diagnostiziert er den „collapse of daily print journalism“ und prognostiziert der New York Times und der ganzen Branche eine düstere Zukunft, er spricht von der „post-print Times“, die nur noch 20 Prozent der bisherigen Autorenschaft beschäftigen werde:
Regardless of what happens over the next few months, The Times is destined for significant and traumatic change. At some point soon‚Äîsooner than most of us think‚Äîthe print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist. And it will likely have plenty of company. In December, the Fitch Ratings service, which monitors the health of media companies, predicted a widespread newspaper die-off: ‚ÄúFitch believes more newspapers and news¬?paper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010.‚Äù
Es kommt, so der Autor weiter, zu einem Generationen- und Kulturbruch, den er so beschreibt:
For those of us old enough to still care about going out on a Sunday morning for our doorstop edition of The Times, it will mean the end of a certain kind of civilized ritual that has defined most of our adult lives. It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind. And it will seriously damage the press’s ability to serve as a bulwark of democracy. Internet purists may maintain that the Web will throw up a new pro-am class of citizen journalists to fill the void, but for now, at least, there’s no online substitute for institutions that can marshal years of well-developed sourcing and reporting experience—not to mention the resources to, say, send journalists leapfrogging between Mumbai and Islamabad to decode the complexities of the India-Pakistan conflict.
Die Lage, das sagt der Artikel in jeder Zeile, ist nicht nur für die New York Times, ernst. Sehr ernst. Dass dennoch so wenig berichtet würde, so Hirschorn, liege an einer Fehleinschätzung der Öffentlichkeit:
If you’re hearing few howls and seeing little rending of garments over the impending death of institutional, high-quality journalism, it’s because the public at large has been trained to undervalue journalists and journalism.
Erstaunlicherweise schimpft Hirschorn nicht auf das neue Medium Internet. Die Ursachen der Krise sucht er vielmehr woanders:
The Times has been on a steady march toward temporarily profitable lifestyle fluff. Escapes! Styles! T magazine(s)! For a time, this fluff helped underwrite the foreign bureaus, enterprise reporting, and endless five-part Pulitzer Prize aspirants. But it has gradually hollowed out journalism’s brand, by making the newspaper feel disposable. The fluff is more fun to read than the loss-leading reports about starvation in Sudan, but it isn’t the sort of thing you miss when it’s gone.
