There never was. Just look e.g. at A. J Liebling’s report of the American newspaper industry of the late fifties and early sixties, which doesn’t differ all that much from Flat Earth News…

Even the Oakland blogger he cited as a viable substitute for professional journalism gave an interview yesterday in which she bemoaned the lack of reporting in Oakland and how bereft the city was of mainstream journalism.

For Tate to list whatever fledgling efforts he can get off the web and claim that they amount to systemic coverage of a regional area is itself a prima facie case of just how empty blog reporting often is. That so many people buy it without actually investigating how much ground those “citizen journalists” are covering is real
herd-of-sheep tragic.

With so much quality civic reporting already being done online for little or no pay, it stands to reason we could eventually get quality government reporting entirely from bloggers, both professional and amateur, rather than depending on a federally-coddled cabal of conspiring nonprofit newspapers, as Simon envisions.

And there are reasons to think the quality would actually be better, since so many of the writers are deeply invested residents, rather than the sort of superficially-engaged, careerist professional journalists portrayed so well by Simon in The Wire and all too common in American newsrooms.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/7/david_simon_creator_of_acclaimed_hbo

A new business model is becoming possible. The platform is the internet itself, which is turning into a single big newspaper. Google is trying to create a ready-made, world-wide advertising department for the thing, using context-sensitive ads. (They figure they can corner the ad department from “search.”) The new model is going to be a hot (i.e. popular, important) “aggregator page.” Drudge and Huffington are the merest hints of what is to come. It won’t be just snapshot stuff. The momentum will be new people who want to be editors, having good ideas about topics, format and choices, and running aggregator pages that present new people who want to be writers and videomakers. In other words, much of the world is going free-lance, and all will share in the AdSense revenue of the aggregator page of the creative editor. It doesn’t even have to be exclusive—a good new freelance writer could show up wherever he or she wants to. There could even be be re-aggregator pages—see popurls.com for an example of how this could look (I found the Susan Boyle video there when it had less than 400,000 hits.) The power is going to reside with the creators, and the best stories will find these new avenues.

In the old days the Journal had a dedicated staff in physical proximity to the New York financial center, and so it could break stories and present analysis that couldn’t be found anywhere else. Its hardcopy subscribers, dependent upon this business news, have been willing to follow it on-line and to pay for it there. This almost certainly has to change. The Journal’s editors do not have a commanding view of the way the world works; their detection of the financial crisis was dismal for example; and any capable young person choosing an editorial career would almost certainly want to do things his or her own way instead—and possibly make lots more money. Similarly the Journal is not going to pick up the best new reporters because the contracts are restrictive—they don’t have the freedom to publish books based on research performed on duty, for example. Meanwhile, something like Wolfram Alpha will obviate most of the numerical analytical functions for which the old readership regarded the Journal so highly. In short, The Wall Street Journal is likely to become further weakened in intellectual firepower, while being swamped by continuous waves of hotter information. How much is the old name worth?

I wonder what Murdoch would like to happen to the BBC…

‘Goodheart is to be taken with a grain of salt, but is anybody here seriously deying that the LRB is a tad biased when it comes to Israel or that large parts of the population in middle eastern countries are blatantly anti-semitic?’

Which makes me think that his definition of ‘original reporting and commentary’ is different from mine. It also makes me think that when he argues that Randolph is limiting himself to ‘too few and similar sources’ this should be interpreted in a highly specific sense.

If that turns out to be indequate, there are various sources, including the Council on Foreign Relations who feature a lot of ‘experts’ in various fields.

What the masses take in as ‘news’ seems to be what you already know + general knowledge.

‘People tell me that a few decades ago, newspapers had much smaller staffs’

novakant, if you look at these multiple sources, mostly they are repeating each other. (I make an exception for genuinely different sources like the English-language al-Jazeera.) On-the-ground reporting means paying reporters, and there’s been less and less money for that in the past few decades. Hmmm. I wonder if this is related to the attitudes that have brought on the global financial collapse. Less and less effort spent on actual work, more and more on pushing around the money made from actual work.