Make room for the big story from hell, breaking news unfit to print: the end of the newspaper world.

The threat level for U.S. newsrooms, which has been at Armageddon levels for years, has escalated to Apocalypse Now. Since 2007, ten metropolitan dailies have folded, most recently the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
The pace is increasing. More than 20,000 jobs have been lost from America’s newspapers since 2007—5,000 of those in the first ten weeks of this year. All of America’s premier print newsrooms are in trouble, because they rely on a dying business model.
FLYP recently joined the conversation at the New America Foundation, where six media professionals convened to consider how we got here and to find the way out.

 

BIOGRAPHIES
Edward Felsenthal
Edward Felsenthal is the executive editor of The Daily Beast, a daily news and current affairs site launched in October 2008. He was formerly the deputy managing editor of the Wall Street Journal and founding editor of the Journal’s Personal Journal section.

Andres Martinez
Andres Martinez worked as editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times for three years. He now directs New America’s Bernanrd L. Schwartz Fellows Program, which identifies and supports the next generation of American scholars and writers.

Tim Wu
Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and the chairman of the media reform organization Free Press. His best known work is the development of Net Neutrality theory, but he has also written about copyright, international trade and law-breaking.

John ThorNton
John Thornton, a venture capitalist for 18 years, has been managing partner for the last four years at Austin Ventures, focusing on software investing and firm strategy. He is the founder and chairman of Steady Strain Media, which is building Texas’s first online nonprofit news brand.

Steve Coll
Steve Coll, president and C.E.O. of the New America Foundation, is also a staff writer at New Yorker magazine. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes and is the author of six books. Previously, he spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent and senior editor at The Washington Post.

Richard Tofel
Richard Tofel is general manger of ProPublica, an independent nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. He was formerly the assistant publisher of the Wall Street Journal and an assistant general counsel of Dow Jones.