The intel­lec­tual jus­ti­fic­a­tion for journ­al­ism has never been kicked around with much con­vic­tion. James W. Carey gave it a shot in the mid-1990s, more in sor­row than in anger.

He was strug­gling to make sense of the twis­ted leg­acy of journ­al­ism within the Amer­ican uni­ver­sity sys­tem, but in passing he let slip the real pur­pose of learn­ing journ­al­ism in the 20C — to under­stand, doc­u­ment and cel­eb­rate the Great Amer­ican City.

And where else to acquire such skills than at the ulti­mate journ­al­ism school, Columbia? Where the prize for gradu­ates was noth­ing less than the oppor­tun­ity to map the 20C’s ulti­mate met­ro­polis — Man­hat­tan — through the pages of the New York Times or, for those of more lit­er­ary inclin­a­tion, the New Yorker.

Carey wrote as New York’s media pre-eminence, its long shadow over cul­ture and ima­gin­a­tion, was draw­ing to a close. And by then, America’s indus­trial cit­ies had long since ceased to be the country’s social engines. Twenty years earlier, the long, slow decline in news­pa­per cir­cu­la­tion had begun.

But pub­lish­ers were still reap­ing fine returns from ser­vi­cing met­ro­pol­itan mono­pol­ies, and journ­al­ism found, in its chron­icles of urban demise, themes almost as com­pel­ling (if not always true) as those of urban rise.

David Simon’s tele­vised obit­u­ary for Bal­timore, The Wire, is prob­ably the final break in the great tra­di­tion unit­ing journ­al­ism and the city. And Simon’s own judg­ment on journ­al­ism reflects his own aban­don­ment of that tradition:

One of the sad things about con­tem­por­ary journ­al­ism is that it actu­ally mat­ters very little. The world now is almost inured to the power of journalism.

…I’ve become increas­ingly cyn­ical about the abil­ity of daily journ­al­ism to effect any kind of mean­ing­ful change. I was pretty dubi­ous about it when I was a journ­al­ist, but now I think it’s remark­ably ineffectual.

Simon is hardly the first writer to make the leave non-fiction for fic­tion. And yet that dis­missal, and his choice of work, gives you the first idea of where journ­al­ism can no longer go and why.

Under­stand­ing the Great Amer­ican City is no longer the raison d’être of journalism.

Instead, under­stand­ing the vast global realm of inform­a­tion that the past dec­ade or so has made avail­able, and its social, intel­lec­tual, eco­nomic, polit­ical — and, yes, enter­tain­ment — opportunities.

Min­ing and mar­ket­ing that realm is the future of journalism.

It’s a future that’s just begin­ning — its lan­guage, still, is Eng­lish. But don’t expect that advant­age to stick around forever.