COMMENT American journalism is at a transformational moment, in which an era of dominant newspapers is rapidly giving way to one in which the gathering and distribution of news is more widely dispersed. As is the case with regional newspapers in Britain, the economic foundations of many of the 1,400 local daily newspapers in the US, long supported by advertising, are collapsing. Their news staffs and printed editions, which have been the chief source of original news reporting – in print and online – are shrinking.
American newspapers are not going to vanish in the foreseeable future, despite frequent predictions of their imminent extinction. But they will play diminished roles in a rapidly changing world of digital journalism .
