Read it and think

You need to read Tony Davis' essay in the latest AJR about tte death of the Albuquerque Tribune.

Then you need to go read David Sullivan's essay about the essay. Sullivan, an editor at the Philadelphia Enquirer and fellow traveler in ACES, is his usually perceptive self about journalism and the business of journalism.

If you take away nothing else, take away Sullivan's last lines:

There really is a lesson here, no matter how much journalists don't want to hear it. A business model needs to support good journalism, but good journalism is not a business model.

Post them wherever you can see them daily lest you think we can simply write our way out of the industry's problems. Journalism as a business is going to severely contract in the next few years. Journalism as a profession may or may not, depending on what other models come along. We as journalists owe ourselves and the public the duty of paying attention, not just thinking that if somehow we write and report longer, harder and better, it will all be OK. It won't.