Boston Massacre

The Boston Globe, $1.1 billion in debt, could close without major concessions from its unions. Over at "Slate," media writer Jack Shafer errs in arguing that newspapers aren't really essential to the future of democracy. What he misses is that every other major news source -- TV, radio, and the hackosphere -- gets the bulk of its information from newspapers. So it's not newspapers per se that are essential. It's reporting, and newspaper journalists do about 90% of it.