No, not THAT RMN.  Richard M. Nixon has been gone these many years.  Today the Rocky Mountain News, Denver’s oldest newspaper, published its last issue.The Rocky Mountain News is one of many newspapers and news magazines exiting the business.  Seattle’s Post Intelligencer and San Francisco’s Chronicle are on the ropes as well.

The news media is in a period of change that may rival anything since movable type.  Even the development of radio and television, significant as they were, did not immediately change the way people obtained their news as rapidly as the digital age has re-shaped western society over the past decade.  That includes not simply looking to television for news, but expecting everything to be accessible on line at any time of the day.  Since 2000, news has become, like entertainment, a constant feature in our on-line lives.  In the previous century, there was change, to be sure.  Radio and television deeply shaped popular culture and public perceptions of world events.  Yet even with the immediacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s voice on the radio with his ‘fireside chats,’ or the live television coverage of the moon landing, most Americans looked to print for serious news coverage.

The detailed analysis of the political activities behind the Watergate burglary got their most careful attention from the print media.  Before the movie with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, there was a book.  Before the book “All the President’s Men,” there was a series of newspaper articles.  Investigative reporting, with careful editing and fact checking made the Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate affair first rate coverage of a political crisis.  The print media were well suited for this kind of journalism.  The reporters could spend the time to conduct interviews and do research, then craft their story.  Editors reviewed it, facts were checked, and editors re-viewed the revised work before it was sent to be typeset, and the presses rolled.  the mechanics of publishing allowed some time for the editorial process to help refine the reporter’s work.  The result was a well researched, well written news story, and an informed reader.

There has been much concern expressed over the past few years about the prospects of a newspaperless democracy, and whether it will perform well.  Some commentators point to the Watergate affair as a reason for fearing the loss of newspapers as the conscience of liberal democracy.  I am not so sure that the fear is rational.  The twenty-four hour cable news channels have given us a lot of constant trivia, to be sure.  But some of the best investigative reporting and anlysis in the past decade has come from the digital media.  The print media can take little comfort from their coverage of the Duke University Lacrosse Frame.  The media were willing to go along with the railroad job.  A few bloggers really got the facts and the critical analysis correct, and distributed it to the world.

While President Obama ran a brilliant campaign using on-line methods, and won, he should reflect on the fact that instant communication works both ways.  His critics are becoming more comfortable with an on-line environment, and his comments will be parsed more closely on line than perhaps the friendly main stream media have. This will help an informed public hold their government accountable, just as newspapers subjected previous administrations to scrutiny.  Blogs like this one offer an informed public an opportunity to see what skeptical voices have to say about the issues of the day.

Blogging isn’t quite the same as having your own printing press and publishing your own newspaper.  Blogging is a lot more democratic, in that it is more universally accessible to people who want to share their opinions with the world.  I will miss the Rocky Mountain News.  But there does seem to be another avenue to public accountability that is promising to keep politicians honest.  That avenue is blogging.