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The media becomes an activist for democracy
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March 28, 2012, 1:01 p.m.
LINK: crosscut.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   March 28, 2012

Crosscut’s Hugo Kagiya takes a look at one of the first newspaper casualties of the financial crisis, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which shut down print and went online-only in 2009, albeit with a sharply reduced staff. Three years in, Kagiya says, it’s further diminished.

“The name survived,” Murakami said. “The brand is more than the name. You can put Mountain Dew in Coke cans but it doesn’t take long to realize it’s no longer Coke. The brand died the day we shut down and when the staff that did the work that made the P-I the P-I were shown the door. Today, the P-I’s spirit is alive more in InvestigateWest than in SeattlePI.com.”

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The media becomes an activist for democracy
“We cannot be neutral about this, by definition. A free press that doesn’t agitate for democracy is an oxymoron.”
Embracing influencers as allies
“News organizations will increasingly rely on digital creators not just as amplifiers but as integral partners in storytelling.”
Action over analysis
“We’ve overindexed on problem articulation, to the point of problem admiring. The risk is that we are analyzing ourselves into inaction and irrelevance.”