Top 10 Stories About Journalism for 2009

2009 was probably the worst year ever for newspapers. Some 40,000 print journalism jobs were lost, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than any single year in the decade. Speaking of the decade, there were 424,500 people employed by papers in 1999. That's now down to 284,220, according to the BLS. Some papers closed entirely in 2009 (see below) while others, like the Philadelphia Inquirer, were in bankruptcy proceedings. At year's end, many worried that newspapers had been forever damaged by the loss of so many reporters and editors. As Joe Strupp wrote in Editor & Publisher: "If things don't slow down, any attempt to properly cover news, and write and edit it, will be lost if it hasn't been already."

Hundreds of small papers have closed in the last few years, but 2009 witnessed the death of two big-city dailies - Denver's Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which became a web-only outfit. Hearst Corp., which owned the P-I, had no luck finding a buyer for the paper, which had been put up for sale in January after losing money for years. The News, which was founded in 1859, was closed by owner E.W. Scripps Co. after losing $16 million in 2008. Both publications were part of a dying breed anyway - they were the smaller papers in two-newspaper towns - so their demise was probably no surprise. But that wasn't much consolation for their loyal readers, or for the hundreds of employees who lost their jobs.

Okay, there was plenty of bad news to go around, but as 2009 closed there was a sense that the business of newspapering was finally improving, or at least not getting any worse. No less than Rick Edmonds, media business analyst for the Poynter Institute, said it plainly: "2010 should be better." Why? Ad revenues hit hard by the recession were expected to pick up as the economy gained steam. Another good sign: Several newspaper stocks were higher in the final days of 2009 after Wells Fargo Securities analyst John Janedis lifted his rating on the sector, citing a faster improvement in advertising sales than expected.

No doubt about it, 2009 was the year that Twitter and Facebook became fixtures in our culture, and it was no different for journalists, who found that social networking sites could also be invaluable reporting tools. In 2009 it was no longer enough for a reporter to simply cover, say, a city council meeting as a single story, using a pen and notebook. Chances are she'd post Tweets about the meeting while it was going on, and shoot video for her paper's website. And after her story was written, she'd probably blog about it and post some questions to her readers on Facebook for a followup story. It was multimedia journalism, no longer a curiosity but standard operating procedure for the 21st-century reporter.

2009 was the year news sites had finally had it with the so-called aggregators, websites that cull headlines and snippets of articles from other sites without paying. The Associated Press, the world's biggest news organization, threatened to sue websites that used AP stories without permission. And News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch accused aggregators like Huffington Post of outright theft, saying: "These people are not investing in journalism. They're feeding off the hard-earned efforts and investments of others." Indeed, a study by the Fair Syndication Consortium found that in one month, more than 75,000 unlicensed websites had reused content from U.S. newspapers, including 112,000 near-exact copies of articles.

In 2009 it seemed ever-more likely that news websites would erect so-called paywalls and start charging for their content. The most vocal proponent of paywalls was News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, who vowed to soon charge for access to all his company's websites. It appeared newspapers had little choice: Print ad revenues were decimated by the recession; classified ads dried up with the advent of Craigslist; and online ad revenue alone wasn't enough to support most news outlets. Former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw put it best: "The most serious mistake we made at the beginning of the IT era... is that we allowed the young pioneers in that business and the users of it to proclaim to the world... that information is free. It is not free."

In June, hundreds of thousands of Iranians, outraged by what they saw as a fraudulent election that returned hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power, took to the streets to protest. As the regime cracked down, barring foreign reporters from leaving their offices, Iranians using the tools of citizen journalism - cellphones and digital cameras, and blogs, Facebook and Twitter - chronicled the protests and the brutal government response. Indeed, it was a grainy video shot by a citizen journalist, of a young woman dying from a bullet wound on the streets of Tehran, that became the iconic image of the entire uprising. It was a brief moment in history that nonetheless demonstrated the power of citizen journalism.

Wall-to-wall coverage of the death of Michael Jackson and the Tiger Woods affair prompted more soul-searching (among journalists, at least) about the increasingly tabloid nature of the mainstream media. Many fretted that by spending precious resources on such stories, the news media was giving short shrift to more important issues and devaluing an already-tarnished brand. As always it came down to the bottom line: In an era of declining ratings, news shows saw their ratings skyrocket in the days following Jackson's death. And as I wrote on this site, news, in the end, is the story of people’s lives. Even detractors had to admit that, at least in Jackson’s case, his life made for a strange, tragic and ultimately fascinating story.

Even with the closing of hundreds of newspapers, there was something particularly sad and era-ending about the demise of Editor & Publisher, the 125-year-old trade publication of print journalism. Generations of reporters and editors had scoured E&P's pages (both print and online), if only for the job listings. But in December E&P's owner, the Nielsen Co., said it would close the venerable publication at year's end. Some held out hope that a sympathetic investor with deep pockets might save E&P, but with all the bad news surrounding print journalism in 2009, it seemed unlikely that the chronicler of that industry would survive.

With his steady delivery and down-to-earth Midwestern sensibility, Walter Cronkite helmed the CBS News anchor desk for the biggest news stories of his generation, from the assassination of President Kennedy and the Vietnam War to the moment when man first reached the moon. His death signaled not just the loss of one of America's great TV journalists but also the end of an era in which the big three TV networks dominated the country's media landscape. Today, with hundreds of cable channels dividing an ever-shrinking ratings pie, the evening network newscasts fight over fewer viewers than ever, and most of those are graying. But at the height of his popularity Cronkite's newscast drew an audience counted in the tens of millions.