First, a disclaimer: I want newspapers to survive, both because I have a lot of friends who work for them and because they still make up a significant chunk of most communities’ journalistic backbone.

That said, there’s a reason a lot of young writers are bailing on newspapers, and Ben Huh gets to the heart of it in this piece for The Washington Post. I don’t agree with everything he writes, but this part is spot on:

Gene [Weingarten] is confusing journalism with the business of newspapers. Journalism is thriving, thanks to cheap and easy means of publishing like WordPress, the huge interest by the readership, and increase in the diversity of opinions. Sure, the new journalism may not look like the journalism of yore, but society isn’t under threat from the lack of journalism. Newspapers, however, are continuing to see declines as the readership shrinks due to an age demographic, inconvenience of print, and shrinking budgets. …

What’s killing newspapers isn’t the lack of new ideas, it’s people who obstruct the change that’s required to survive.

Read the rest here. (Fittingly, I wrote this post in WordPress.)

Update: And this piece by Alexandra Petri, which Huh references, is a great take on what it’s like to be a young newspaper reporter today, asked “to write a story and then produce an interactive personality quiz photo gallery for it using JavaScript, which is noble but not quite how we pictured things. ‘You are under 30, so this is your metier, right?’ they say, hopefully. ‘Absolutely,’ we murmur. ‘And tweet more!’ ‘Sure!’ we say.”