“The collapse of daily print journalism will mean many things,” Hirschorn writes.

For those of us old enough to still care about going out on a Sunday morning for our doorstop edition of The Times, it will mean the end of a certain kind of civilized ritual that has defined most of our adult lives. It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind.

It’s a great metaphor, perhaps, for the feelings of the industry at large: In a piece that goes out of its way to extol the obvious democratic virtues of a vigorous press, we get a concomitant anxiety about the very democratization of that press. A print product is, after all, inherently exclusive; inclusion, especially in the top publications, is the prerogative of a privileged few. In that sense, print isn’t merely analogous to an elite class of intellectuals—it also actively engenders and sustains it. (“Civilized ritual!” “Smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals!” “Semi-charmed lives of the mind!”) Compare the members-only salons that are the Times and its peer publications (as Hirschorn does) to the Web—a rollicking, no-rules party to which everyone with an Internet connection is invited: Journalism’s movement toward the Web shifts publication itself from being a privilege of a few to the right of the many.

There’s a subtle, but palpable, sense of cultural and intellectual xenophobia that seeps into Hirschorn’s treatment, one that mirrors the anxieties generally attributed, fairly or not, to mainstream journalists (those amateurs are coming in and taking our jobs! they’re not going to respect our traditions and values! they’re going to change our way of life!)—and one whose internal implications, indeed, feature certain parallels to our current debates about immigration, assimilation, and who and what should constitute a culture. I can’t decide whether it’s ironic or fitting, but it’s worth noting that “End Times” appears in the Atlantic issue whose cover story asks (provocatively!), “THE END OF WHITE AMERICA?” (Tagline: “Culturally, America is already post-white. Demographically, we’re headed there, too.”) The issue’s two articles may have more in common than we’d initially assume: Like the country at large, journalism, demographically, is headed toward diversity. The real question, Hirschorn reminds us, is how we all assimilate.

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