Mainstream media are in disaster mode.

Advertisers, which once begged for their business, have found a younger, sexier, more skilled and seductive lover — the Internet.

Without advertising (and in the aftermath of the Great Recession) conventional newspapers, magazines, television and radio newsrooms compete to fire journalists — particularly experienced, skilled, more expensive journalists — in a desperate, doomed bid to survive.

The Internet is the uncontrollable wild west provider of instant information and world’s largest functioning anarchy.

It looms over the traditional world of print and broadcast journalism like an electronic angel of death. Its aggregators, Twitters, Facebooks, MySpaces and blogs, along with its hungry, growing corps of “citizen journalists”, is likely to destroy ethical professional journalism as we know it.

There will be no ethically-trained, dedicated, professional journalists to question, to seek fairness, context and balance, to investigate, to dig into records, to check and double check, to bear witness, to bring understanding, to speak truth to power and to serve and protect the Free Marketplace of Ideas that is the essence of ethical journalism and the glory of democracy.

Unless we find a solution to all this very soon, our democracies — built over so much resistance and on so much sacrifice over so many centuries — are in grave danger of dying.


(Samantha Jones is the nom de plume of a Canadian TV journalist who's just publisher her erotic memoir "My Life In The Great Sexual Window.)