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“The lunatic suicide of the press”

UPDATE: We get email. Here’s the latest:

Please credit the source of Justin’s article, which is MusicalAmerica.com of which I am the editor.  I made the link to it free, so I’d appreciate your crediting us and putting a link in.
Thanks
Susan Elliott
Editor
MusicalAmerica.com
www.musicalamerica.com

Since the post already had a link in it (it’s cleverly disguised as the word “link” at the bottom), and since many of you have already followed the… link… to MusicalAmerica.com, I’m feeling a bit redundant this morning, but for now, please enjoy the fine prose that follows, which comes to you thanks to all the fine folks at MusicalAmerica.com:

Pulitzer-winning classical music critic Justin Davidson on how newsroom managers are responding to declining audiences by mutilating the product…

After I left Newsday, where I worked as a critic from 1996 until I joined the staff of New York magazine last year, the paper virtually ceased coverage of classical music. In the most recent spasm of buyouts, it also sacrificed two movie critics, a visual arts critic, and a TV critic and cut loose the freelancer who wrote about dance. But to put that in context: In the past few years, Newsday also shuttered its foreign bureaus, closed the national desk, halved its Washington staff, pulled out of New York City, whittled down every other department and slashed its total number of pages.

…and on how blogs aren’t the answer:

An army of amateur bloggers can’t send reporters to war zones or spend months sifting through obscure records in search of government abuse. There are some forms of journalism that only professional journalists, backed by the resources of major news organizations can tackle. Abandoning those stories squanders the protections afforded by the First Amendment: Why would the government bother abridging the freedom of the press, when the press is doing such an efficient job of abridging itself?

link

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