The profession on the edge of forever

The headline for today's thought piece should be known to any Star Trek (or possibly South Park) fan, but for the doubtlessly vast majority who aren't, "The City at the Edge of Forever" is maybe the finest piece of sci-fi ever filmed. In it, Dr. McCoy gets sent back to the 1930s purely by happenstance and ends up changing history to the point where the Nazis win World War II and the Enterprise ceases to exist, so it's up to (of course) Kirk and Spock to fix things. Yet it turns out what that will mean for Kirk is an incredibly difficult sacrifice. 

Then there's the South Park episode of the same name, where the kids are stranded on a bus teetering over the edge of a cliff, the bus driver who went to get help completely forgets about them and, to make matters worse, a monster outside is picking them off one by one.

This is all how the state of journalism feels anymore.

I was reading in the Guardian earlier this week that the Star-Ledger, the largest newspaper in New Jersey, is going to online only, which by itself is shocking enough, but it also mentioned a study by Northwestern University showing that since 2005, two-thirds of journalism jobs have vanished like the Enterprise, and 2.5 newspapers a week are getting picked off the teetering bus that is the journalism profession. In a separate article on Axios (an online offshoot of Politico, which itself is an online offshoot of the Washington Post, which I'll get to in a bit), it shows a map of every county in the US where their local news sources are either one or none. We are holding the line as best we can, but it's a news desert out there. 

So where did it all go wrong? Did someone meddle with the timeline? Probably not, though given the state of the world right now I think the jury might still be out on that. So is it the monster that is social media, which I so often like to decry, that's eating us? I think that's part of it. But then I look at WaPo losing a quarter of a million subscribers practically overnight after megabillionaire owner and Mr. "Democracy Dies in Darkness" himself, Jeff Bezos, played the "neutrality" card at the very last minute and pulled their endorsement of Kamala Harris, and I think some of this is self inflicted. Theoretically, as editor of a paper that has an established policy against endorsements I should say bravo, but no; an 11th-hour change of heart, on just that one specific race, is not an act of courage. It's the act of someone whose other, far more profitable businesses rely on government contracts and cheap shipping through the Post Office. 

Obviously that's not the case for the little guy, but the impact of the big guys' missteps reverberates through the whole cultural perception of journalism, the profession teetering on the edge of forever. And yet, as my colleague wrote last week, democracy depends upon it. So saving it, I suspect, will require no small measure of sacrifice. Either that or time travel. Anyone have a flying DeLorean I can borrow?