Kyle Regan—a masochistic Stranger reader—has vowed to do every single thing recommended by the Stranger Suggests (movies, galleries, bars, concerts) for the month of January. Look for his reports daily on Slog. —Eds.

Journalism's demise wasn't a huge concern to me. I wrote a whopping two articles for The Roosevelt News back in high school: a review of the Blue Scholars in-school performance (which everyone had to attend anyway) and a report on the dangers of ear buds (just as exciting as it sounds). But I'm now writing an entry a day for a local weekly's blog, so I am linked to journalism's fate... if only for the month of January. If The Stranger went the way of the PI, what would happen to my temporary non-paying non-job?

So I waited in the nearly sold-out auditorium for the authors to and tell me what I can do to rescue journalism.

John Nichols and Robert McChesney spoke one after another. To make a long and sad story short, American journalism is fucked. Michael Jackson has a stronger pulse than the news industry. It was almost like church for academics: every time McChesney or Nichols damned the industry for its greedy ways, the choir of young journalism students and cranky old people would tut, sigh and shake their heads. The PI's demise was like talking about Voldemort... The-Paper-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

It wasn't all doom-and-gloom. There was some praise of Seattle: our media outlets—including the Stranger—covered their visit while most city's papers and radio stations blacklist them. Paul Constant got a shout out for his “smart” review. To repeat what Constant wrote, the solution they pitched was government subsidies. Significant subsidies. Doctor Evil-raising-a-pinky-to-his-mouth subsidies. It's detailed in their book, The Death and Life of American Journalism. Constant gave it a good review, so the pan has been vouched for... by someone working in the dying industry the authors want to see subsidized.

I got a chance to ask Nichols and McChesney for their thoughts about The Stranger. They weren't very familiar with it, though the elderly crowd offered their opinions freely: “The Rocket was better,” said one, and someone else accused the Stranger of “furthering a neo-liberal agenda.” Personally I can't go a day without furthering the neo-liberal agenda.

This experiment—going to everything the Stranger suggests for a month—is starting to wear on me: I've been spending a lot of time in clubs, seeing bands, drinking. So using my brain instead of my liver and eardrums was a nice break. I expected a bingo hall of old people and sadness and that's not quite what I got. There were younger faces in the crowd, those students, and seeing people my own age made journalism's horizons seem a bit brighter.