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Newspapers are in trouble, so report the newspapers. So does network television, also facing new challenges from both cable television and the internet. This week, NPR’s On the Media posed the question on how to save newspapers. They played excerpts from a recent Senate commerce committee hearing on the future of journalism. After pointing fingers at one another, with Google News and the Huffington Post on one side and greedy media conglomerations on the other, the consensus seemed to be that the newspapers in particular and “old media” in general needs special help to survive.

Of course, there is an inherent conflict of interest in the media debating the virtues of the media. Journalism is a profession and a business, with its own history, customs and practices. Like all businesses, it has little interest in seeing reform or change come to its time-honored traditions. Unfortunately for the Fourth Estate, the barbarians of new media are at the gate and reform is coming to the industry, whether or not it is welcome.

The media like to use “bloggers” as a straw man to attack when discussing the woes of the current state of journalism. These ambiguous, amorphous figures sit behind laptops and anonymity, publishing the first rumor and hearsay to reach their inbox. Bloggers, according to the media, have no respect for journalistic practices and do not know how to write a story. One key question seems to go unanswered in this discussion — what is the difference between a journalist and a blogger?

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I opened my browser today to get a check of the headlines from the Washington Post, using their “mywashingtonpost.com” custom portal. I was quite disappointed at the message I received today:

Thank you for being a loyal reader of washingtonpost.com and a user of our customized mywashingtonpost.com page. Over the years, washingtonpost.com has developed new technology and methods to customize the delivery of our news, features, multimedia and more. As a result, we will be discontinuing mywashingtonpost.com as of February 23, 2009.

[Links omitted]

Thank you for your understanding as we offer more ways to get you the washingtonpost.com content you want quickly and easily.

Sincerely,

David Heyman
Director, Customer Care

Anyone who had accessed the site in the last several months would have guessed this was coming. The articles on the site were often stale or out of date. The weather widget never reported accurate information. In fact, the site never really developed after its initial launch. The feature I enjoyed most was that mywashingtonpost.com allowed me to strip down the sections to what I wanted most: international, metro, politics, and technology.

As newspapers have struggled to cope with the new era of instant information, a number of different models have come and gone. The NY Times, for example, tried to charge a subscription fee to accesses much of the site’s content. This model, of course, doesn’t work with casual observers, but it was worth a try.

There is a real danger, in my opinion, of the WP’s lack of innovation will only hurt its position on the internet. As news aggregator sites and other third-party sites continue to pull headlines, the relevancy of visiting the WP’s site is becoming more and more diminished.

I will, however, miss mywashingtonpost.com. In fact, I’m not sure how I’ll access the Post’s information in the future. While I have a number of RSS feeds in my aggregator already. I deplore the main page layout — it’s too overrun with adverts, cluttered and poorly organized, and focuses too much on “fluff.” I especially hate the WP’s overuse of poorly written, browser slowing javascript. And don’t get me started on “autorefresh.”

Of course, I may just be complaining unnecessarily. I haven’t spent much time on the WP’s main page. I could very well adapt to using the site in this way, or give the RSS another try, or some combination of the two.