Original image by Wikimedia Commons user France3470.

The future of the press is critical to all liberal democratic societies because it is still our most important source of political and social news. By the press, I mean the morning, mostly broadsheet, dailies in the large capital cities of virtually all Western countries. Of course, the morning newspapers no longer have anything near the largest audiences of the news media, dwarfed especially by television, but by and large they still set the news agenda that most of the others follow. Their editors decide what are the main stories that people will read that day, and they provide the editorial framework within which the other older and newer media operate. Most of the lineup for the evening television news still comes from the contents of that morning’s broadsheets. Talk show hosts, shock jocks, bloggers, and the rest of the media commentariat mostly take their cues from stories that have been defined as important by the daily press. The reason for this is that the morning newspapers still employ the greatest concentration of journalists who do the research that makes the news: these journalists go out each day and see what people do, hear what people say, and write it up. Their research gives their editors a far greater pool of story material than anyone else from which to select the daily news. The journalism of reporters and editors in the morning newspapers still remains the first draft of history.