Fourth Estate Foreclosure: Why We Need a National Endowment for Journalism

Alex Stonehill, Common Language Project

2009 promises to be another tough year for the journalism industry, and it looks like it's our turn to take a beating here in Seattle. The imminent closure of the Seattle Post –Intelligencer, the city's oldest and second largest newspaper was announced last week, just a few months after the second round of major staff cutbacks in 2008 went down at our other major newspaper, the Seattle Times.

With the country sliding into a massive recession, two major foreign wars raging, federal investigators uncovering a series of juicy political scandals, and our first black President entering office, all on the tail of an exciting local weather emergency, it's hard to imagine the newspaper industry is having trouble finding news people want to read.

So what's the problem? Industry insiders blame the internet for all of newspapers' woes. But it's a bit more complicated than that.

Here's my basic take on what really happened: As control of papers and other news sources were consolidated and corporatized over the last decade, decision making was wrested away from editors and publishers who actually know and care about journalism, and into the hands of businessmen and boards of directors who brought the wisdom of the business world to newspapers… and promptly ran them into the ground.

Alex Stonehill is an executive editor and multimedia journalist at the Common Language Project. The CLP received a grant from the Pulitzer Center for their reporting project "Water Wars" on water scarcity in Africa last year.