Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s week started badly Sunday when a blistering review of the inner workings of his campaign was posted on the website Politico.com.
Politico is a political junkie’s dream of a website, founded and run by journalistic refugees from The Washington Post.
Regardless of the outcome of the fall campaign, as others have noted, the appearance of the Politico story represents a watershed moment for the media industry.
Stories like Politico’s exposé used to wait until after the election, when there is plenty of blame to go around. Just as important for our purposes, stories like this used to be broken by the old standard bearers of the trade, the big city dailies, like The New York Times, or, well, The Washington Post.
The fact this story didn’t wait until after the vote is an indication of how badly things are actually going behind the curtain of the Romney campaign, yes, but it’s also evidence of the constant pressure of the never ending 24-hour news cycle.
Even more important for our purposes: the fact this story was broken by a website is the latest evidence the guard is changing in the media industry.
While big city dailies struggle and fail to be all things to all people, community newspapers like The Lincoln County News aren’t going away anytime soon.
Nobody is getting rich but we are hanging on and we will hang on because there will always be a real desire for people to want to know what is going on in their community.
As long as there are boards of selectmen and school boards making decisions that affect local taxpayers; as long as police are arresting local criminals, or even better, local kids are making good, local people will want to know.
As long as they do, there will be a demand for community journalism.
Fifty years from now there may not in fact be newspapers as we know them today, but there will still be news.
In the future, people may well take their latest Lincoln County news in some technological form we can’t even imagine yet, but there will be a demand for people to know, and God willing, we will still be here to keep you informed.
