Reporters Love to Be Cassandraesque....

...but this is ominous. Only people who are fanatical readers of newspapers are aware that TV pretty much rips all its reporting off from newspapers. It doesn't, in short, do any reporting that could pass ethically, enterprise-wise, or editorially for same at the schlockiest newspaper in the world. And when the NYT stops reporting, there will be no news that is not driven by TV's imperative of 40 per cent profit margins. Think of the news as an endless loop of the alarmist shit broadcast from 4 to 6:30 on your local news every day. Car crashes. Pedophiles. Germs on telephones. Back-to-the-bunker stories which have created, in my opinion, the new generation of freaked-out moms. And suburbs without yards because, well, you know, there are pedophiles outside. That's the news.

On the other hand, Twits may just be too dumb to commmunicate their news.


A friend at the Times recently said he doubts that in five years there will be a print edition of the paper, except maybe on Sundays. Once the print New York Times is extinct, it’s not at all clear how the paper will pay for its primary job, which is reporting. Any journalist who cheerleads uncritically for Twitter is essentially asking for his own destruction.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2010/02/neither-luddite-nor-biltonite.html#ixzz0erajnsHX