Certainly, a very selective reading of the most hopeful developments — there’s good work being done in many places, The New Yorker still comes out every week, we have high hopes for Glenn Greenwald’s new site, and soon — would make it seem like things are humming along.<\/p>\n
But if you look at the newsrooms cut in half, the state capitols with almost no reporters watching them, and the papers that continue to fold, the suggestion of a golden age is just ludicrous. Salon’s Andrew Leonard gets it right here<\/a>, where he refers to the way several billionaires have recently invested serious sums in news organizations:<\/p>\n But what kind of money is coming out<\/em> of it? A true golden age of journalism, if it is to last more than a few ephemeral years subsidized by check-writing billionaires and venture-capital speculation, will require that publishers make a profit and writers and reporters can make a decent living.<\/p>\n But I\u2019m not hearing from a whole lot of happy writers. If you are lucky, you might be able to command a freelance pay rate that hasn\u2019t budged in 30 years. But more people than ever work for nothing.<\/p>\n Yes, there are a handful of high-profile start-ups making waves, but it\u2019s not at all clear that they\u2019ve replaced the hundreds and thousands of metro and fore![\"200px-Android_4.4.2\"](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/200px-Android_4.4.2-168x300.png\")
ign desk reporter jobs that have vanished in the last decade… And \u201cnationwide, the number of full-time reporters covering state capitals was cut almost in half between 2003 and 2009.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n