Last week the news broke that the Tribune-Review’s Pittsburgh edition will cease its printing operation Dec. 1. Despite that the Trib’s commercial printing arm prints the Globe, the Globe is not directly affected by this change.

The troubling part of this past week’s announcement is not the cessation of the medium – it has long been obvious that daily and weekly printed newspapers would become outdated. The troubling part of the announcement is the loss of 106 jobs and the reasoning for it.

Since the death of Richard Mellon Scaife, the Tribune-Review’s publisher who brought the paper to Pittsburgh as a conservative voice after the 1992 merger of the Post-Gazette and Pittsburgh Press, the paper has struggled with financial stability.

Jennifer Bertetto, president and CEO of Trib Total Media, told the Post-Gazette that the realignment, which included 95 buyouts earlier last month, was not enough to create financial stability.

The troubling thing about the cessation of print operations is that it is the largest symptom in the effect of a crumbling local media. With fewer people covering local events, the people of Pittsburgh are less informed. For college students looking to work in the media, fewer internship opportunities exist.

The name Trib Total Media implies the company is involved in multimedia – all the media. If the death of the print product was to expand digital journalism, that’s one thing. Slashing and burning, as appears to be the case, is another altogether.

At a panel at the CMI last week, KDKA Political Editor Jon Delano said local reporting is the only exposure some people have to national issues. Audiences pay attention to what’s happening in their own back yard.

We at the Globe believe in print journalism, obviously. You’re reading this either in our weekly print edition or on our website. That said, we acknowledge that printed papers as a medium may be on their way out. We’re adapting to a changing market, however.

We are increasingly asking our journalists to be photographers as well as writers.

We’re expanding our online breaking stories and doing our best to take breaking stories to our Twitter and Facebook pages. Our efforts to better serve the Point Park community are how we’re diversifying our coverage.

The future of journalism lies with multimedia reporting. At the Globe, at least, we’re embracing the future of journalism and future journalists in an effort to create a better product to get our students the news they need.