Jared W. Smith

The Post & Courier is offering to buy out their employees to help cut back salaries without layoffs. This scares me. We need newsrooms; despite the rise of citizen journalism, there is still an important place for the trained, professional newsgatherers who hunt the stories, who have the access and the discretion necessary to advance a story objectively. Newsrooms still drive the agenda in the country. The blogosphere gives us an unprecedented opportunity to provide a check and balance against an increasingly corporate media, but the blogosphere still largely thrives on the newsrooms. Newspapers need to stop focusing on the medium and start focusing on the message; becoming platform-agnostic is the only way newsrooms will survive, and it’s frightening how many publications simply do not get this.