The Fourth Estate: A Modern Obituary If you’ve lived for many decades, you’ve heard your peers bemoaning the unwelcome changes we see in American life: increased traffic, the diversity in crowds, the urban noise, the ever-changing rules and regulations by which we must live. Thomas Friedman, author of an important new book, Thank You for Being Late , addresses some of these concerns resulting from our changing technology. I’d like to address one of my own journalistic concerns resulting from changing technology: the death of the Fourth Estate. Consider this a death notice. What is the Fourth Estate? It’s a term devised in Europe in the 16 th century to describe those who wrote the news. Not the dailies and weeklies we know today, but the writers who unveiled the activities of leaders, both royal and elected, and kept the tax-paying public aware of governments’ activities. In Europe, the church was the first estate, nobility the second estate, commoners the third estate. Follo...