Wire creator David Simon on the decline of print

A well-written first hand account of what it's like to work at a paper in North America. I (and Esquire) give you David Simon, creator of The Wire (which, incidentally, is the best television show ever produced in a kind of plain, epic way... but I digress) and former writer for The Baltimore Sun.

The excerpt I link to is a great read. I guess I'll have to pick up the March issue to get it all.

It took me a long moment to regroup.

“John,” I said finally, “if I was the editor of a major metropolitan daily and I had to retract three stories by the same reporter, I would remember it until the day I fucking died.”

I’m not prescient. At that moment, I can’t yet fathom all the still-to-come Tribune Company cost cutting at The Sun, the Kafkaesque reductions in staffing, the slow-motion demolition of the Washington bureau, the shuttering of the foreign bureaus.

And I am still as clueless as the captains of the newspaper industry when it comes to the Internet, still mistaking the Web as advertising for the product when, in fact, it is the product. I don’t yet envision the steep declines in circulation, the indifference of young readers to newsprint, the departure of display advertising to department-store consolidation and classified space to Craigslist.

Admittedly, I can’t even grasp all of the true and subtle costs of impact journalism and prize hunger. I don’t yet see it as a zero-sum game in which a serious newspaper would cover less and less of its city -- eliminating such fundamental responsibilities as a poverty beat, a labor beat, a courthouse beat in a city where rust-belt unemployment and crime devour whole neighborhoods -- and favor instead a handful of special select projects designed to catch the admiring gaze of a prize committee.

Edit Jan 17 - After returning to Understanding Crime after... well, after months and months, I've found the New Yorker profile of David Simon here.