Who will tell the people?
That oft-repeated line was first written by Mary Anne Evans, the Victorian novelist who was best known by her pen name, George Eliot.
Don’t get me wrong; I wouldn’t know George Eliot from George Foreman. Frankly, until I sat down to write this column, I was clueless about the fact that Eliot (who more famously authored the classic, Silas Marner) was a woman.
But that trenchant question, asked rhetorically by one of Eliot’s fictional characters, has been nagging at me lately.
Considering what’s happening to the newspaper industry, in general and metro Atlanta media, in particular, I wonder ‘who will tell the people?’
As a lifelong reporter, the meltdown of modern journalism has me understandably worried. As a citizen of this region, the implosion of our local newspapers has me terrified.
My former employer and the state’s largest daily newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has shrunk – literally and figuratively – into a shadow of its former self as its readership and revenues have tanked.
In the two years since I left the AJC, the staff has been cut dramatically, key departments have been downsized or eliminated and the reporters still working there are stretched far too thin to do their best work.
Recently, the paper’s publisher announced the decision to shutter the AJC’s storied downtown headquarters and move the bulk of its operations out to the suburbs by the middle of 2010.
