This blog has been idle while I’ve spent the last couple weeks working on (and coordinating) KPLU’s coverage of the end of the Seattle P-I as a newspaper, and the prospects of Seattle becoming a No Newspaper Town.  Our 3-part series really captures the anxieties and hopes of this moment in history.  It also brought out a number of thougthful comments form listeners/readers.  We’ve done a lot of continuing coverage on the topic, which is all grouped on the page linked above.

My personal contribution was to explore the question, What’s next? That led to a lot of reading on the future of journalism, various theories of social media, and the underpinnings of the business of news.  It’s the business model that’s collapsing, where advertising subsidizes news, and the smorgasbord of news/entertainment is bundled together in a single package.    (Note: the written version is not a verbatim transcript of the radio story — part of KPLU’s experiment in adapting to online consumers.)

The short answer, by the way, seems to be:  Nothing will replace newspapers, in the near future. Something else has to evolve.

A return to science, coming soon, along with further experiments in “new media” …