A Bit of Good News About Journalism

By: John Cassidy | The New Yorker

Earlier this week, in a post about the fallout from major editorial turnover at The New Republic and journalistic flaws in a Rolling Stone account of an alleged sexual assault at a University of Virginia fraternity, my colleague George Packer noted that “the crisis in journalism is a business crisis, and it’s been going on for twenty years.” That’s perfectly accurate. With the arrival of the Internet, the old business model of relying mainly on revenues from print advertising, both display and classified, was fatally undermined, and efforts to replicate the advertising model on the Web have largely failed. Publishers know this story all too well, and they are still struggling to deal with it.