Has postmodernism destroyed journalism and more?

Los Angeles journalist Scott Timberg's new book about the pressures on journalism, journalists and the creative class more generally is out. Since it deals with the news business, the Columbia Journalism Review reviewed "Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class." The book grew from Timberg's experiences after his 2008 layoff as an arts and culture writer for the Los Angeles Times, during the worst days of the Tribune era at the paper. If you don't remember how crazy those days were at the LAT, you might almost not believe it.

Timberg saw in the economic troubles he and many like him endured a great upheaval in society. Except from the CJR review:

According to Timberg, America’s entire creative class—a group he defines as embracing everyone from rock musicians and architects to bookstore clerks—is under assault. In his view, the slow death of print, our obsession, is just one manifestation of a much broader and more troubling crisis.

Expanding on stories that Timberg wrote for Salon, Culture Crash is not just a cri de coeur for an endangered set of jobs and institutions. It also is an audacious, if undeniably speculative, effort to detail the causes of these cultural tremors, and to point the way toward possible solutions.

The roots of the problem, Timberg argues, lie deeper than the latest economic downturn or technological upheaval. “Though highlighted and exacerbated by the Great Recession, these shifts started earlier and almost certainly will extend for years into the future,” he writes. “The arrival of the internet and the iPhone, while crucial, are not the only forces at work here.” Casting a wider net, Timberg implicates such factors as the rise of postmodernism, the (possibly related) devaluing of the arts and humanities, and an unforgiving winner-take-all marketplace.

Culture Crash is an ambitious manifesto on two fronts. First, Timberg yokes together a raft of developments—some clearly parallel, others less obviously related: the struggles of the music industry to counter bootlegging and cut-rate streaming; the burgeoning of the freelance sector (and its simultaneous impoverishment); the pressures on journalism and book publishing; shifting emphases in higher education.

Second, he links these phenomena to what he sees as a decades-long attack—some of it fueled, ironically enough, by the creative class itself—on “middlebrow” culture.

CJR's writer in the end isn't fully convinced, but the book sounds interesting.