No Tears

It's a really rough week at The Los Angeles Times, and things don't look much better at The New York Times, either. So this Shirky-fueled blast from LA Weekly curmudgeon Marc Cooper is particularly, um, bracing:

While a few months ago I took the pro-Times side in a Times-sponsored online debate, I now have to officially announce that I am with bored with, done with, totally finished with any more grieving about the fate of the Times -- or any other newspaper for that matter...

As I wrote last month, I am completely convinced, indeed, I am certain that journalism will easily outlive the death of its current institutions. I'd much rather concentrate on what's here and what's coming rather than dwell on what has been.

I have also argued before that we are barely in the infancy of the digital revolution. In Byte Years, the so-called New Media is about 3 days old and anyone who claims to know exactly what is or what is not in the making is lying to you.

The printing press was invented to propagate the bible. Instead it produced the enlightenment. It took a couple of hundred years to mature, but history is much more patient than we are.

...We are in a transitional moment. The old system is dead. The new is still struggling to be born. We should be rooting for the latter and not kvelling over the corpse of the former.