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The future of the end of journalism

Magazine Death Pool is pretty self-explanatory: It’s a growing list of matter-of-fact closure notices for English-language mags in the vein of Newspaper Deathwatch.

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It may help you understand what happened to your Hunt Club Digest subscription and avoid the hilarious rage of commentators like this one: “I just subscribed to Hunt Club Digest!!!! What the FUCK! I’m going to hunt those fuckers down man….”

Inevitably, recessions spawn dead pools. But the whole death of print is becoming quite a ridiculous spectator/speculator sport.

Even Google’s in on it. Search “newspapers aren’t dying” and it returns with “Did you mean: ‘newspapers are dying.'”

The New York Times recently posted a blog with some tongue in cheek bailout suggestions like requiring the government to print all their job listings in newspapers, and get Congress to divert cash to buying subscriptions to each high school and college student in the US.

But this morning the New York Times wasn’t as glib, stating it’s going to go ahead and shut down the Boston Globe.

Perhaps we should seek expert opinions. Last month, rabble.ca held a What’s Wrong With Our Newspapers lecture where Peter C. Newman declared “It’s too late for newspapers to adapt” and went on to add, in his delightfully curmudgeonly way (like those old guys sitting in front of a TD Bank) that because investigative reporting wouldn’t sell papers, reporting skills were being wasted. There were no viable solutions.

Linda McQuaig basically blamed newspaper biases, making sure to jab at the National Post much to the crowd’s delight.

When a schoolteacher asked what to expect from media in 20 years the answer from Rabble’s Wayne MacPhail said “facetiously, Torontoist, BlogTO and Spacing.” Well, thanks!

That same event started with Rabble’s boastful declaration that its entire enterprise runs on the equivalent of one prof’s salary, but failed to point out that much of their content is aggregated from columnists earning their keep at big papers.

And then there’s Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Will they help kick start a non-profit NPR-type model? Or will the journalists of tomorrow be trust-fund kids who are happy to work for free on mini-endowments from mom and pop?

Gawker’s certainly doubtful of the calibre of emerging journalists.

It seems like we’re all getting a little too caught up in the hype. What’s next? The end of books at the hands of Amazon’s Kindle 2?

Well, the deathwatchers don’t have the answers and just show (bask in?) the carnage, but at least they might soften the blow when you don’t get your July UK Maxim by having you shedding a tear today.

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