Thread by @ChooseOneShop

Dear @sophieGG,
Somewhere around 1800 local newspapers have shut down in the United States since 2004.
bbc.com/news/world-us-…

Don’t take this tweet’s word for it, check out @businessofnews at @CISLMUNC. She has a study called The Expanding News Desert. Local journalism is, in fact, dying. usnewsdeserts.com

She’s a woman, so her perspective may be more easily digestible for you than those of Messrs. @jonathanalter, Block, and @steveemccarthy in Deadline Artists on @HBODocs. #BreslinandHamill hbo.com/documentaries/…

Sincerely hoping that you bring more nuance to your other cultural analyses than you did in @TheAtlantic to that documentary.
theatlantic.com/entertainment/…

You saw a piece that said, maybe we left some things in the past that are worth some reflection; maybe the future is shinier, but it isn’t always better, and some of our inventions leave great big holes in the fabric of our lives.

Holes like apprenticeship. First, you were a copyboy; you watched, learned, and kept your mouth shut. Then, they’d let you do obituaries, to see if you had a knack for the craft. You’d graduate to sports, to learn how to watch an event and tell its story.

Then, you’d cover local news and, in a decade, or so, if you were good enough, they’d let you loose on columns. In the process, you learned a craft and your place in it.

Here is a documentary #BreslinandHamill that celebrates the power of the written word; the personal, local relationship between a reporter and a city; a gritty, dangerous, pre-gentrified world, where you lived by your wit’s honesty and your sense of empathy; ...

... where a guy who didn’t finish high school could tell the greatest city in the world what to think of itself; and all you saw was what was missing.

The fact is, our economy, our way of life, can’t support local newspapers and the technology that enables you to have your gig isn’t just unable to support a certain type of critical journalism, but is actively hostile to it. bbc.com/news/world-us-…

The absence of local news coverage is a major loss in the fabric of our democracy & you have no answers,but the preposterous cliché implication that a possible side-effect of all this rampant masculinity was keeping a gen. of talented women from their rightful place in city rooms

In May 1990, when Jimmy lost his mind and started screaming at Ji-Yeon Yuh, the first words out of his mouth were about knowing your place. No, he wasn’t talking about a woman’s place in the home. He was talking about apprenticeship.

Here was a 25-year-old rookie telling a 61-year-old greatest print journalist in the country that she was “disappointed in him;” not to his face, but in an email.

You thought of yourself as one of Hamill’s “new people who come” and enrich and here is a movie that says maybe, through no fault of your own, you are failing. And you objected viscerally and the bitterness is all over your piece.

There’s no shame in moving forward with new inventions and new ways, even if one of their by-products is a Trump presidency. But there is shame in not recognizing things we leave behind and not trying to bring the lessons of the past into our future.

Journalism isn’t dead. However, it does have some new wrinkles and holes.

. @TheAtlantic can be updated instantly all over the world and reach billions in the flash of an eye. Print has no answer for that.

That said, the young apprentice woman with her pad and pencil covering the city council meeting in Flint, Michigan for the local gazette is a role that we are missing, we are ignoring, and we desperately need. That was the real eulogy in Deadline Artists. #BreslinandHamill

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