For my money, the best analysis I’ve ever seen comes from blogs, and like Marc said the alt-weeklies are the best sources of investigative journalism.

Schaffer: Oh my god. The Times is dying! CBS is closing its news division! Clearly, we must freak out.
Violet: I will not freak out! For I think these are good things, because maybe over time people will start listening to people who aren’t on CBS or in the Times.

(Except, in fairness, Schaffer smart and not panicking, but he does seem to think we’re going to have to start relying on the town crier.)

It costs the New York Times a bunch of money to keep an office in Baghdad because they’re coming in as part of this big imperialist machine, and whatever else imperialism may be, it is not cheap. That’s the kind of enterprise that is truly threatened, and I am not crying for it very much.

I should’ve mentioned that I think professional journalism will survive in some form or another for a long, long time. Hell, I think the Times and other such institutions will survive, but they’ll have to change how they look at the world and news-gathering. Long after kids are asking, “grandmum, what’s a newspaper?” There will still be people like Paul Salopek who take their western perspective and go to places where it is deeply foreign, and there will always be National Geographics willing to pay him to do so. I think there’s value in that. But the fact that those outsider voices will be balanced by the voices of people whose lives are the news is overdue.

There are very few really serious journalists and media outlets anymore. And their audiences are small and diminishing.

Instead of the “talking head” shallowness of breezy tabloid TV “news” being recognized and eliminated, the cancer has spread into newspapers, many blogs, etc.

Mudd and Scaffer remember Woodward-and-Bernstein-style journalism. The fact that Cheney/Bush have escaped virtually unscathed despite being responsible for crimes much more massive than Nixon ever attempted, is a ringing condemnation of the current state of serious journalism today.

It’s inevitable that the Internet will provide the serious content needed (and it already has to some extent). It’s much easier to have a successful niche “product” on the Internet than in physical print or TV. A small but loyal audience is available for just about anything, without the huge startup and operating costs of a newspaper or TV channel.

The paradigm is shifting, and I don’t think we will ever see things like they were in “the good old days” ever again. Which is not unusual at all, and in fact, is just another part of “the great circle of life”…

i think we agree on some points but not the conclusions. investigative journalism is one of the areas blogs have yet to excel in, primarily because — as you say — it takes a bunch of time and money to do it right.

the problem is, most newspapers are doing a crap job of it, too. they’ve cut waaaay down on investigative journalism while pumping up the op-eds and pulitzer puff pieces as they struggle to stay viable. only the alt-weeklies seem to be trying to dig deeper and tell stories that aren’t sitting right on the surface.

if the mainstream media was doing its job, we would’ve had more than john stewart and the blogs and the alts shrieking about the obviously fallacious reasons for going to war with iraq. to this day, the AP and most major networks/papers spend their time on 2 things: regurgitating words from primary sources like the white house press secretary with no thoughtful critique or analysis or insight of any kind, or going the other direction and having some partisan hack spew ignorant gibberish to sound outrageous.

other than a few peeps like sy hersh, the mainstream media severely lacks voices of expertise and reason that will tell the f***ing truth. but they’re all over the blogs - juan cole, lindsay beyerstein, pam spaulding, bitch phd, and those are just some of the big names.

what i think we’re finding is that the blogs will eventually be among the sources digging deeper. as violet points out, we’ll have access to less-filtered primary sources like people *living* in iraq. we’ll also have field experts like cole who get paid to know this stuff and blog about it because it’s their passion. and shoot, when we had mcboing here, i learned a lot more about how ugly cable corps worked than i ever got from any old media outlet.

so, yeah. go hordes. and 2002, apparently.

This sort of knee-jerk anti-”old” media reads like something from 2002, it’s not the level of thoughtful insight I expect from punkass. It’s rather simple, shallow point.

I have problems with simplistic, bombastic dismissals of blogs by the mainstream press, but I’m equally annoyed with this blather about the death of old media.

Blogs work as checks and connections which old media now fails to do (often using the excuse bloggers do it for them) and some enterprises like TalkingPointsMemo are moving slowly towards standalone journalism - interestingly this model ends up resemble “old” media in some ways.

But most blogs, dispite my love for them, are little more than independent pundits, making original observations but wholly dependent on material from other sources - almost entirely old media material. The reason for this is the old media product, despite new media contempt, is still produces the well funded and better vetted material than, say, Pajamas Media. Due to the libel law loopholes covering the internet - the ones which allow Matt Drudge to exist - vetting is an issue.

I’d like to see some unfunded blog like Punkass deliver fully researched, edited and verified in-depth local stories using only original sources on daily basis, but it has yet to happen. Meanwhile, current experiments in citizen journalism are struggling to find ways to screen out PR flacks. Plus there’s the issue of how the medium of new media is wholly owned by massive corporations with even less interest in the public good, if that’s possible. If newspapers die off, then the spigot of news will fully be in the hands of people who want to eliminate net neutrality - and are finding ways to do so even with regulation.

I’m just saying. Nice thoughtful-ish rant, tho’.