The bad guys will win

The American newspaper industry is in meltdown and no one is angrier than David Simon, even though he quit the newsroom 13 years ago.

Nowadays he is revered as a television dramatist, creator of The Wire, one of the most acclaimed shows ever, which has just started showing, finally, on British mainstream television. But as he watches the great titles of American print fall like dominoes, he fumes that not only newsprint but journalism itself is heading for extinction, and The Wire illustrates the consequences.

Every week brings dire news: the Rocky Mountain News, once the chronicler of the great Frontier, closes down; the Christian Science Monitor silences its presses to try to survive as a website; the Seattle Post Intelligencer follows it to web only; the Chicago Sun Times closes a printing plant, while its rival the Tribune shutters its Washington bureau, unheard of for a leading newspaper, and heads for bankruptcy along with the Los Angeles Times which it bought in what turns out to have been a fatal fever of 'consolidation' and debt. Small-town newspapers die in droves.

The media, watchdog of democracy, is losing its teeth as politicians run riot

The result, Simon warns, is that the watchdog of democracy is losing its teeth, leaving the politicians and their bagmen to run riot in self-interest and so reduce their cities to the corruption, dysfunction and crime portrayed in The Wire, which is built around local politicians, cops and journalists.

What does Simon know about this? Well, he's the real thing, for years a crime-beat reporter on the streets of Baltimore, the city where he set his shows with scripts he describes as so rooted in research that they are "stealing life".

Born in Washington, DC, in 1960, and brought up there, he was inspired to go into journalism by the Washington Post's celebrated investigation into the Watergate scandal. He believed that journalism was "God's work", and joined the Baltimore Sun.

A stocky, pugnacious man with a bull neck, Simon loved working the streets to tilt at the powers and institutions he believed responsible for Baltimore's decline and violent, drug-plagued communities. But the culture of the newsroom transformed as the business side of journalism changed. "I got out of journalism," he says, "when some sons of bitches bought my newspaper and it stopped being fun."

Simon blames those 'sons of bitches' for compromising America's once-independent city newspapers with an ethos devoted to big business, corporate buy-outs and the maximising of short-term profits to ease the debts of leveraged buy-outs. They have shown "nothing but contempt for their product", and the pay-back is that they are losing their investments.

He has no faith in the idea that the new media of online newspapers and the 'citizen journalism' of blogging, simply