The SF Weekly reports that last night’s SPJ discussion on the future of the Chronicle didn’t even draw enough people to fill a small city library auditorium. (Here’s a link to the SFGTV streaming video of the discussion.) The SF Weekly’s Benjamin Wachs writes:

Not only was the stage crowded with panelists who are exclusively involved with journalism in the Bay Area, but virtually everyone in the audience was also a journalist or blogger.

There is no clearer evidence, sadly, that the demise of journalism is a subject which only journalists are talking about, to other journalists, in the media. This is ironic — because one of the things that members of the media think, at least according to the media panel at the journalism forum, is that journalism is failing because it has spent too much time talking to other journalists in the media.

Whatever they say is killing journalism, the real cause of death is lethal irony. It’s a post-modern post-mortem.

Wachs goes on to give some bullet points on the best and worst parts of last night’s meeting. Amazingly enough, the SF Weekly, which has been feuding with the Bay Guardian for years, credited the Guardian’s publisher, Bruce Brugmann, as being the man most on point when he said that a major newspaper can do what a thousand blogs never will when it comes to serving as a corporate and government watchdog.