Business Coverage Evaporates in Media

(MoneyWatch)  Among the many ancillary effects of the collapse of traditional journalism over the past couple of years has been a steep decline in business coverage. Since we are business reporters here at BNET, each of us can name friends and colleagues who are no longer doing what they used to do where they used to do it.

One voice I particularly miss is that of Dan Fost, who covered the media industry for the San Francisco Chronicle. His pieces were invariably well-sourced and insightful, but alas, he's no longer at the paper. There are many others.

Now, thanks to Chris Roush of Talking Biz News, there is actually a working list of the contractions in business journalism over the last 15 months.
Here is the damage he's documented:

• At least 44 daily newspapers have cut their business sections during the week.
• Some 16 daily newspapers have eliminated their stand-alone Sunday or Monday business sections.
• At least nine major metropolitan papers and 14 other business news outlets have substantially reduced their reporting staffs.
• At least two business news journals -- Financial Week and the East Bay Business Journal have ceased operations. (Earlier, Business 2.0 magazine went under.)

The result of these cuts includes a news vacuum for business readers in many communities, as well as the loss of the public record and the collective history that helped knit local networks of business people together.

Blogs and social networking sites are flooding into this vacuum -- LinkedIn is a more reliable source of what your colleagues are up to than the local paper, that's for sure. But, inevitably, a fragmentation by industry is also occurring, with the resulting loss of cross-fertilization of ideas across disciplines.

Similar trends have stymied universities, governments, large institutions of all types in recent times. To address this problem, we need some new media platforms to emerge that can effectively re-integrate knowledge across fields and industries at a suitable level of granularity to replace what we have lost.