By: Mark Fitzgerald The fastest way to ensure the future of newspapers may be to show America what it will look like without newspapers, a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist argues.
T.J. Sullivan has launched an online drive to urge all U.S. daily newspapers to switch off their Web sites from midnight of Independence Day, July 4, until Friday, July 10.
"Call it 'A Week Without a Virtual Newspaper,' Call it crazy. Call it costly. Call it whatever you want, but it's no more drastic a measure than asking people to work for free," Sullivan writes in a
post on LA Observed.
Pulling the plug on newspaper Web sites would bring the industry crisis home to the American people, Sullivan argues.
"It makes it impossible for anyone to deny where the majority of news content comes from, and why it matters," he writes. "For without virtual newspapers, what would Drudge report? What would Huffington post? What would Google News and Yahoo News and all those cut-and-paste blogs that get so much of their material from newspapers have to offer if newspapers went away?"
Sullivan says the online news blackout is no more outrageous than some of the measures -- unthinkable not long ago -- that dailies are already taking to confront the crisis: dropping home delivery on most days in Detroit, ordering chain-wide furloughs at Gannett and at many Lee Enterprises and MediaNews Group papers, and folding whole sections.
Right now, Sullivan says, people have no real reason to ponder what would happen if newspapers providing news fodder for the Web ceased to exist.
"It's not that Americans don't care," he writes. "It's simply a matter of human nature. Until the discomfort reaches the readers -- at which point it will be too late -- there's no motivation for them to get involved in finding a solution."
A video about the week without online newspapers is posted at E&P's business-oriented
Fitz & Jen blog.
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