Will 2008 be remembered as the year journalism died? Some say so. If anything, its the year that newspapers downsized, cut beyond the quick and even left print. The bell tolled for at least one more newspaper, Asian Week, probably most famous for the Kenneth Eng debacle.

This news is actually a few weeks late. I wanted to write about it, but didn’t have the time to really articulate my thoughts. From the article in the SF Chronicle:

AsianWeek will continue to publish online, at www.asianweek.com, and produce special editions about Asian American business, professional development, heritage and other issues and will still host events, but the print edition is going away because of economic realities, Ted Fang, editor and publisher, said in an interview Wednesday.

“It was very tough,” Fang said of the decision to shut down the presses. However, he said he believes the printed newspaper is but one of several means of communicating and noted the increasing adaptation to digital formats, particularly by Asian Americans.

Fang said that nearly all of the 11 AsianWeek employees in San Francisco will be let go.

Its a little sad that this paper will be best remembered for the “Why I hate Blacks” debacle perpetrated by Kenneth Eng, who, appropriately enough, had to be examined by psychologists after threatening his Queens neighbor. (But then, later that year, SF Weekly points out that they published a story about Asian men who love Black women. The cartoon, which I swiped from their blog post, looks amusingly like Mr. Eng.)

As with the demise of any newspaper (be it by being relegated just to the web, which is not necessarily a terrible thing, or by decimating its staff, which I think is much worse), I feel a loss. Even though I have always loved online journalism and was part of the first online journaling movement, I still have a love for print newspapers.

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