Journalism -- Long may you run

These are dark times for the newspaper industry. Nothing enlightening about that statement, huh? It's become kind of like a dog-bites-man story.

The newspaper I work at -- a once-proud goodly sized daily trying to keep a stiff upper lip over recent indigities -- recently had buyouts with layoffs to come, both on the heals of prolonged downsizing. But I fear that is not the worst of it. For we are in the clutches of that dolled up whore called convergence.

Now, don't get me wrong, convergence is a beautiful beast, this heated coupling of the old-line media and that black widow darling, the Web. She can give us immense power. Attract us a whole new clientele, those hip thritysomethings or, gasp, even those trendier twentysomethings.
And what's to argue with, right? The Internet can do it all, baby. You can have audio, video, reader surveys, citizen journalists (less expensive), blogs. It's all the rave, daddy-o. Look at the TV news, they're doing it. MSNBC's hurricane watch the other day was pulling some weather.com stuff, some streaming video from the internet (wasn't TV streaming video?) -- you name it.

As I said, membership has its advantages. Newspaper stories essentuated by video or audio on the Web are cool. The video and the audio and the slide shows add things that plain print can't. A survey lets the reader in, baby, let them feel apart of the show. No matter that what they say -- unlike the day of the letter-to-the-editor -- is many times uninformed or racist rants (annonymity has its advantages, too).

Here we already survey (so hold those letters-to-the-editor gramps) and we audio and we slideshow and we video (the written word just can't translate the excitement of that weekend fair).

We also do some writing for a newspaper, not as much as we used to, but some.

The newspaper is now the sideshow and our news mission is somewhere lost in oblivion. What the hell are we? A newspaper with a website? A website with a newspaper? Second-rate TV news? Third-rate radio?

The worst is the egg heads don't seem to have the balls, or the desire, to run a newspaper anymore. So we will jump on spot-news -- car crashes, slayings, fires -- like we are ambulance-chasing lawyers, and the stories that take the time, nuance and experitse of real news gathers, will be lost to posterity.

But no one will notice, because it's all the rage.