More grist to the mill from one of my favourite reads, John Robinson. Here is Robinson, (who edits the News-Record in Greensboro, North Carolina) explaining why he missed a retired editor speaking about the good old days and proposing another old-fashioned remedy for the news industry’s ills:

Doubling the size of reporting staffs would certainly serve the community. The more journalists reporting the good, the bad and the ugly, the better.

But those are the effects of problems facing newspapers not the cause. While good journalism has not changed markedly since the 1990s, technology has.

So has the audience. So have people’s habits.

Not addressing those changes in discussions about journalism and newspapers is like talking about television as if there were still only three channels.

Those changes:

• the economic distress faced by traditional newspaper advertisers such as department stores
• the loss of classified revenues
• the splintering of the attentions and interests of the audience
• the ability to get news and information from thousands of other places and in dozens of other ways
• the sluggishness with which newspapers have anticipated the future (now present) and the sluggishness of their response

These won’t be fixed by reducing the profit margin or going back to the journalistic world of the 1980s and 90s.

He isn’t wrong.