Philadelphia a town rapidly heading toward the newspaper abyss

Fading to Black has an interesting read about the dire situation for print newspapers in Philadelphia.

In it there is a success story about a group of downsized staffers at a newspaper in Liberal, Kansas who after being shown the door, opened their own and installed a printing press and are making money again with good news stories.

But my favorite paragraphs were right at the end, describing the consequences of eventually losing the large majority of professional journalists with a recounting of this episode from the 2008 elections:

"You can already see some of the risks of a country reliant on the Internet without the traditional checks and balances provided by the professional standards of established journalism. During last year's US election, several stories whirled through the media sourced to one political pundit, Martin Eisenstadt. You may even have heard of some of them: a casino planned for Iraq's Green Zone; the shock of Paris Hilton's family at being used in a John McCain TV ad; the failure of Sarah Palin to understand Africa was a continent, not a country. But Eisenstadt was a fraud, created by an Israeli prankster, Eitan Gorlin, via a fake think-tank website. Yet his tales had a life of their own, permeating the net, eventually appearing on television and in magazines, creating reaction until they became part of the debate.

When the truth came out, Gorlin said something that revealed much about the perils of a media world dominated by the Internet - anyone can believe anything they want to, simply because they read it online. "We're real because we have 50,000 Google searches," said Gorlin. "What could be more real than that?"