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.