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Shrinking news rooms hurting quality

The many and deepening cuts at newspapers are starting to take a toll on their content, according to a study being released today.

The challenge newspapers must meet immediately is to find more revenue on the Internet, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s study.

“America’s newspapers are narrowing their reach and their ambitions and becoming niche reads,” the study said.

A friend, occasional reader, and former newspaperman has commented that bloggers such as myself are like the shrews who survived and thrived at the time the dinosaurs died off. Newspapers, of course, being the dinosaurs in this metaphor.

Maybe some bloggers would survive independently of the traditional newspapers, but I don’t do much in the way of original reporting. I rely and expand upon the foot leather of the journalists who actually go out and get the news. Newspapers will die, however, to the extent they abandon this function. The other stuff put out by newspapers can generally be produced by amateurs without a lot of loss of value — editorials being one of the primary examples. Opinions are like certain body parts in that everybody has one.