ABSTRACT
The cultural revolution currently underway in America's newsrooms is making journalism's ethical conversation increasingly irrelevant. Right around the time that Janet Cooke published her story, computer terminals first began to appear in American newsrooms. Accompanying the technological revolution in American newsrooms has been a cultural revolution, introduced by newspaper management. Another ethically significant transformation in American newsrooms has been the graphics revolution. Although the existence of journalism depends on the existence of a public that cares about public affairs, it is less clear that the future of newspapers depends on journalism. Civic-minded readers are a relatively small constituency, and their journalistic interests will be weighed against the interests of other market segments. Increasingly, journalistic decisions are being made not on the basis of journalists' professional expertise about what it is important for the public to know, but on the basis of market research about what kinds of things customers, or potential customers, want to know.
