The Fuse is Burning

So says Kevin Carey in his commentary in The Chronicle, "What Colleges Should Learn from Newspapers' Decline." The Twit-Away? The internet has caught up with newspapers; higher-ed shares many similarities and it catches colleges within our lifetimes (perhaps 10-15 more years).

He recognizes that this Cassandra call was made in the late 1990s, and that today it doesn't ring true. As more and more iTunes University high school seniors graduate, the tipping point for delivery mechanism from the lecture hall to the internet approaches. This is particularly true for "survey" courses in any curriculum.

He accurately skewers one of the misnomers of the decline of newspapers -- "The problem is that the (New York) Times is not, and never has been, in the business of selling news. It's in the print advertising business" -- but buys into one of the other pillars of today's panic -- "A strong society needs investigative journalism and foreign bureaus."

Really? Is that going to disappear when the Times stops printing nationally? Or is that function going to shift to the new advertising folks -- Yahoo, et al. (Did anyone else pick up yet another investigative sports piece by Yahoo!, this time time the texting at UConn.?)

More later on Carey's column.