Via Yglesias, the columnist Rosa Brooks announces her departure from the LA Times and makes a solid case for public financing of journalism.  It’s worth reading.

Increasingly, it looks like newspapers are on the way out unless they make some dramatic changes.  Yglesias is skeptical that public funding is necessary to save newspapers, but I’m more sympathetic to Brooks’ view.  The future of journalism is hard to predict, but I see the newspaper business fading fast.  Either newspapers will become nonprofit organizations, or they will disappear.

Some fans of new media may think that it’s not a problem if newspapers disappear because blogs will replace them.  But as much as I love blogs, I have my doubts about the idea of bloggers and freelancers replacing the service that professional journalists have provided for the public.  For instance, if you look at some of the most popular political blogs today, very few are doing investigative reporting because it’s so expensive.  As Yglesias points out in a very interesting post about Twitter, online media just doesn’t have the power to generate much revenue.

It’s true that Talking Points Memo’s Muckraker has been able to pull off investigative reporting, but it’s not a very large operation, and its audience is necessarily limited to the internetigentsia.  This is not to say that TPM’s influence is limited, as Josh Marshall and his team proved during the U.S. Attorney scandal.  By the way, that was a wonderful smack-down of certain condescending fools in the traditional media who like to make fun of bloggers.  The point is, unless TPM and other blogs like it invent a breakthrough method of generating much more revenue, their capacity for the kind of reporting that journalists have traditionally done is going to remain very small.

I see blogs playing an important role in the future of journalism, and that role will be defined in the near future.  But replacing newspapers?  No.  In the immortal words of Charles Barkley, I may be wrong, but I doubt it.