Is Grim. What Replaces It?

I had lunch and dinner recently with former colleagues of mine back from when I worked at Sky & Telescope. The topic of conversation came around (as it usually does) to the fact that tree-based dissemination of knowledge (via magazines and newspapers) is giving way to knowledge being made available via electronic means (Web, Internet, etc.).  This is causing all sorts of changes in the print/info industry, not all of it good. I know that S&T, for example, has downsized its staff (or rather, the parent corporation that owns S&T is ordering those downsizes), and that similar layoffs are occurring at newspapers and magazines everywhere. I have to assume that this is because of a number of factors: migration of advertisers to online business models, migration of readers to online sources of information, cost of labor (money to pay writers and editors for print publications), and cost of equipment and buildings to maintain print products.  In short, money’s tight, people and equipment cost a lot, and it’s often cheaper to put the news out online. How you make money from that is the big question that I suspect gets rocketed around the executive suites of news organizations a lot.

At our place we decided that we didn’t need to get a daily newspaper, so we stopped getting it. We still get a few magazines, but have cut those back quite a bit, too.  Because I’m a science writer, I already have many, many good sources of information online, and don’t need to get print subscriptions to journals (I have electronic subscriptions).  In short, I get a lot of my news online and rely on fewer print pubs to give me more in-depth looks.

I thought about all this when I got the news that another friend got laid off from a job as a science writer at a magazine. I notice that science writers in general have been getting the boot a lot.  For example, Miles O’Brien was summarily shoved out at CNN (thus depriving the network of a good, qualified science writer/reporter).  What sort of message do these layoffs send to other writers? To the public?  That science isn’t important enough to be covered? That years of experience in science writing isn’t worthy of treasuring in a news organization?  (But sports ad nauseum, politics up the wazoo, opinion columns that are sometimes thinly disguised propaganda for political or business interests, and bra and panty ads are more necessary to a modern civilization than an understanding of the technology and science we use every day?)

For the sake of our societies as well as the science writers whose collective wisdom is being thrown on the junkheap of progress, I hope that as we move to an electronic-based information model, some of the people who are now being left in the dust as print media collapses will bring their voices online.  We can’t afford to lose them.