There’s a paywall up at Janesville’s GazetteXtra.com, with some content available for free, but much more local news now behind a paywall. I’ve no idea whether their effort will be a success, and the best one can say is that it will be tough going. Everyone at the paper surely sees that.
In the end, though, it’s not ‘local news,’ but local news in which the press scrutinizes local government, that truly matters. Print’s dying, and is so ill that it believes itself even too weak to reach for restorative medicine.
That medicine, of course, is news that scrutinizes politics and politicians, that speaks truth to political power.
News should mean more than reworked press releases, government-drafted announcements, dull recitations of facts, and obituaries.
Perhaps someone from print will summon the strength and will to extend an atrophied arm toward the nightstand, and grasp the medicine that offers, as it always has during centuries of liberty on this continent, a dependable cure.
But if not, and if every established print publication (and similar online ones) should succumb to the malady of servility, then the rest of us will go on, using new media to express and defend that centuries-long heritage (each in our own small, but sincere, way).
America will be just fine, with her best yet ahead.