Re: Non Sequitur vs. LICD

Mike Peterson wrote:
On May 25, 12:34 pm, JC Dill <jcdill.li...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Mike Peterson wrote:
The idea that web
advertising will support a system of newsrooms around the country and
around the world is already being disproven and is obviously false on
the face of it anyway.
Perhaps the idea is we don't need such a large system of newsrooms
around the country and world. When I see a press conference and I see
dozens of reporters, I wonder why? Why do we need *so many* people to
report on the same event? I don't think we do need that many people
reporting on one event. IMHO the news organizations need to diversify -
fewer reporters on any one event or topic, cover more topics. Or, we
simply have too many reporters (and too many news organizations).

So what you're saying is that we don't need any reporters in, say,
France or Germany. We'll just cover it from UN headquarters. And we
don't need reporters in Iowa or Mississippi, because news only happens
in New York, Chicago and LA.

If this type of reporting is typical of today's news reporters, then what you propose is a far better alternative than what we get now - because I didn't say anything like what you claim I said. I suggest you retract and apologize for the statement you just made, mis-stating my position as you summarize and restate what you claim "I'm saying".

And one reporter in Afghanistan, because there's a war there. No
reason to have dozens of reporters to cover any story, is there? Well,
heck, why waste money on that one guy? Let the military send out a
summary of what happened that day. I'm sure they'll be honest about
it.

I'd love to have more reporting from war zones, especially reporting from reporters who aren't "embedded" and under the control of the military.

What I don't want is 40 of them all staying in the same hotel and reporting on the same events from their hotel windows which happens far too often - not just in war zones but also in places like when a hurricane is blowing in to a coastal city. I've seen many still photos showing a line of reporters each recording their "live from CityX" 6 pm news report just a few yards apart on the same wave-swept section of pier. If you take a transcript of what they each "reported" you won't find a single bit of news that wasn't covered in the first report.

And one news organization. You want Fox or Huffington Post? It doesn't
matter, as long as they cover the news.

As long as we have freedom of the press we will have far more viewpoints and news sources than just one news organization. I hardly consider Faux News a durable news source. I predict they will implode (loss of network sponsorship and advertising as fewer and fewer businesses can afford to to be associated with such a lunatic fringe) long before the next presidential election cycle.

Most newspapers have very little actual new news (gathered from their
own investigation and reporting). Mostly they republish news gathered
from somewhere else and we can do that ourselves on the internet.

This is nonsense. You can't republish news if nobody is gathering it.

Most newspapers regularly republish news nationwide that *one* person or *one* news gathering organization gathered. All you have to do is google for a news story and find dozens of newspapers reprinting the same SINGLE wire-service article, over and over and over, verbatim. Occasionally you find the same story with minor edits, and each version (original and edited) copied time and time again.

The ignorance of what is in the newspaper aside, this isn't even
logical. IT HAS TO START SOME PLACE.

Yes. But it doesn't have to come from a "news organization". This is where newspapers are missing the point. They think they are necessary - they aren't. If they don't do a good job they will go out of business and news will be reported on from some other source - such as a local blogger.

That's the point.

That's your point. My point is that the original source doesn't have to be the source(s) we have been getting our news from for many years. If the traditional sources don't adapt, they will be replaced by new sources.

I can't remember when I last picked up a phone book. I go online now to do all the research I used to do with the phone book because I get more information online, faster, easier. Some of this information comes from the same source (e.g. superpages.com) and some comes from new sources. News is undergoing the same type of change as information directories have gone thru. The information directories embraced the internet early on (superpages.com has been around for a long time) and are still going strong.

Regurgitating press releases and rewriting news stories from the
articles that come down the wire are usually not producing anything
worthwhile. If a newspaper wants to survive (in print or online) you
need to tell me something *new*, don't just repackage something I can
learn about elsewhere from someone else.

Why don't you go get a newspaper right now and try to actually read
it. If it's all wire copy, then you are wasting your money. But I
don't know a newspaper like that and I don't think you do either.

Send me your snail-mail address (my email address works) and I'll mail you copies of my local rags for you to evaluate.

Here's some online examples:

http://www.montereyherald.com/ci_12436070
http://www.montereyherald.com/local/ci_12445423?nclick_check=1
http://www.smdailyjournal.com/news_listing.php?type=wnews
http://www.mercurynews.com/celebrities/ci_12447924
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/05/25/state/n161242D27.DTL&tsp=1
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/05/25/national/a173544D74.DTL&tsp=1
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/05/25/national/a062332D10.DTL&tsp=1

All of these are "front page" stories from their respective websites. The Murky is the worst - it's now one of a local news conglomerate's papers and they reprint articles and features from each of their local reporters in all the papers instead of filling each paper with actual local news.

If you're going to criticize, take the time to analyze, please. This
is ridiculous, circular logic that repeats my point -- without
newsgathering organizations, there won't be any news for the re-
packagers to re-package and the bloviators to bloviate over.

You keep assuming that bloggers are simply re-packaging news reported on elsewhere. Many bloggers investigate and report on things first hand, rather than simply regurgitate news written elsewhere, for example:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/
http://factcheck.org/
http://mediamatters.com/
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/05/22
http://fuglyhorseoftheday.blogspot.com/
(about 50% of fugly's blog is first-hand or from material sent to her by readers rather than passing on news previously reported by another news source. Often she has or gets more information about an issue than was reported by another news source.)

Or I can go to a source directly:

http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2009/05/millimeter-wave-whole-body-imager.html

OK, so here I'm "relying" on a government agency to give me some honest news. OTOH, when was the last time your paper (or any paper you read) wrote an article about the TSA, and how much of it was original reporting versus repeating something that came down the wire? Compare it with the amount of original reporting one can get from the TSA blog every week.

It is my opinion that original reporting blogs are going to become more and more common and eventually become a major source for news all around the world. I won't have to rely on a US news service to send a reporter to Baghdad, I will be able to read a blog written by someone who has lived in Baghdad for years and get a first-person report of the news. One big advantage of this type of reporting is that I don't have to worry that the reporter has twisted what their source said into something different from what was actually said. When the reporter *IS* the source, what they say is what they say.

jc
.

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