So farewell then, Christian Science Monitor

For all their faults, newspapers are essential to the public sphere. In between stories about Jade Goody, how tomatoes/whatever give/cure cancer and topless women, they provide an arena for debate, they inform us and they hold our lords and masters to account.

Britain has a healthy newspaper-reading public. Despite the slumps in circulation, they sell in the millions every day. Not so in the US, which has a narrowly corporate media industry and very few national papers (basically the troubled New York Times and USA Today - which is rubbish). So it's very depressing to read that the Christian Science Monitor is about to move to web-only publication (except for a weekly print digest which I suspect won't last long). Despite its dubious (contradictory?) name and nutty origins, it was a fine, independent publication which really cared about foreign affairs, unlike virtually every US outlet, and produced top quality journalism.

We're in trouble when the most powerful country in the world is populated by people who don't want to know what's going on elsewhere. When I was in Arkansas in 2001, the only world news I could find was a slot called 'The Global Minute', which lasted less than a minute and didn't quite manage to encapsulate the complexity of world affairs.

I'll miss the CSM, and I think that we're all poorer for the rash of US newspaper closures. An informed public is a more outward-looking, liberal public. Yes, the CSM will exist online, but it will become one more site in a billion, looking no more authoritative than any ranting git with some web skills. Furthermore, the web is great at pinpointing individual bits you decide to search for: a newspaper is a great expanse of paper you can browse through, while drinking tea and munching toast. You can rip bits out, circle things, wave it madly at whomsoever has the misfortune to be around you. Newspapers ROCK!