I mean, even when we feel the media isn’t taking a strong enough stance on political corruption, peace, etc they are often still reporting on it to some degree or we wouldn’t know enough to complain about it. Sure, there’s no law that says the journalists couldn’t just do that work outside the framework of a traditional newspaper. But apart from the money being nice, it also provides a structure and direction for the coverage – and trust – as the commenter above says.

Personally, I don’t really trust the NY Times much more than a good blog, I think journalists there are just as human and biased as everyone else (what’s worse some journalists seem to consider themselves such authorities they have a right to decide what’s-what for you). Still, I think good journalism deserves to be put on a pedestal – just like good blogs do. If we can only get newspapers to stop reporting on the exact same stories, in the exact same way, over and over, it would really free up the time and resources to do all things they SHOULD be good at.

It’s easy to see news wire journalism as the boring bit of journalism, but it’s actually a huge responsibility and skill to provide an up to date narrative of world events that so many different people can go along with. Considering how big and bad they are, I think they are doing fairly well. It keeps us all more or less on the same page around the world – which would be really impossible, if everyone were just zooming around on the internet reading their favorite blogs. “Hello, President Bush.” “Oh hello, Chancellor Merkel.” “How about the Middle East?” “Yeah, how about it, let me just check my RSS reader on my iPhone.”

You have provocative thoughts, to be sure. But I’m going to have to go with Cliff on this one — most blogs lack authority and trust on the level of the NYT.

Let’s take this piece by piece:

You say: “I’m a fan of good journalism myself, but even more so, I’m a fan of hearing directly from the source.”

I would agree with you, and I would also argue that those things aren’t mutually exclusive. What you get from hearing a four minute interview with Sten isn’t at all the same thing that you get from reading his blog day after day. You told me the other night, that rather than having a produced, and edited piece, you’d rather just sit with, say, an unedited 20 minute raw video of Sten rambling and skip through the boring parts. I argued that you’re in the minority, and that most people wouldn’t want that. (This is proven by the fact that if you go on the iTunes Top Podcast listings, of the Top 10 podcasts that are out there, nearly of them are professionally done, and half of them are simply podcasts of PUBLIC RADIO shows that existed before podcasting.)

That said, I agree with you that listeners should have the option to do so if they like.

You also say: “Why can’t those candidates speak directly to the people? Why do they need to be spun by professional journalists?”

I totally agree with you on this. To some degree, you’re seeing that happen. Look at all the political campaigns that have blogs now, or podcasts (John Edwards pioneered this, if I’m not mistaken, in being the first presidential candidate to have a podcast), or Facebook/MySpace/whatever accounts. But I can also tell you that with rare exception, any campaign would rather spend their time talking to the CNNs, NPRs, NYTs, WSJs, etc of the world, rather than Joe Blog, or hell, even Daily Kos. But the fact of the matter is that I believe that there is value in what we do as journalists. We contextualize, analyze, and distill. We explain, educate and inform. Like any profession, particularly one built on public trust, we get it wrong, and we do our best to rectify the situation in such cases. I’m not pissing on bloggers here, I’m just speaking the truth. Yes, there are bloggers who do that and who try/want to be journalists and who, god forbid, commit acts of journalism every once in awhile. But not all bloggers are, by default, journalists.

I’m guessing that some of your non geeky friends of yours who are educated and politically engaged might want to listen to 10 (or hell, 60) minutes of a campaign call, but the masses won’t. Frankly, I have no issue of making campaign calls available to the public. I think it would be a very bold choice, and would require minimal work. But for some reason, there is an irrational fear amongst the “Old Media” about making the inner workings of what we do available to the public. It shouldn’t be like that.

Let me give you an example from 2005, when I was at Columbia. I had lunch with Dave Winer, and he challenged me to provide more journalistic transparency. I have no problem with providing notes on a piece once it is published. People can read my semi-coherent notes if they like. Today, if I do a radio interview, if a source asks, I will be more than happy to give them the raw tape to do with as they like once our piece airs.

But not everyone is like me. A couple years ago when I worked at Macworld, there was a part of me that was still a 15-year-old kid that suckled at every word coming out of the mouth of Steve Jobs. At that age, I always wanted to go to a Stevenote and witness the magic for myself. I still know that those fans are out there. So when I was working at Macworld magazine and it was my job to record the keynote address, or whatever Apple Special Event, for the purposes of excerpting on the podcast — I also wanted to make the entire audio available that same day to our devoted public. I knew that as a kid that I dreamed of having such unfettered access to a place that I couldn’t go.

Anyway, so I asked my bosses at Macworld, in addition to our produced, edited podcast, could we provide the entire audio of the Apple Event? The answer was an unequivocal no. Why? Well, because Apple has some stupid policy about not allowing full recordings and that we, the magazine, would get in trouble with them. This of course, is despite the fact that such an incident had never occurred, and more to the point, it’s impossible to conceive of a situation where Apple would be upset because the unfiltered words of its CEO reached the straining ears of its fanbase.

Apple did make recordings of the keynote address available, but sometimes it took a day or two. I had them, complete, and ready to go immediately after the conclusion of the address. So what did I do? I leaked that tape to Engadget. Guess what? NOTHING EVER HAPPENED TO THEM.

Now, would the educated general audience who wants to know the overall of what happened at Apple’s event care to listen to the entire hour? Probably not. Would us geeks who play Apple keynote bingo? Probably yes.

The same applies for politics and all the rest. For whatever stupid reason the Clinton campaign is afraid of by not letting their calls become public is probably the same inexpliable reason that Apple/Macworld magazine don’t want to either.

I personally, have no problem making my raw materials, tape, notes, whatever available to whoever wants them (pending my editors’ approval) following publication/broadcast.

Finally, I think that this Serbian blogger has valid points to say and a great vehicle in which to say them. But his comments are a response to what is happening around him, and they only have impact because you already know that Belgrade is under attack because you’ve gotten the facts from BBC/NYT/whatever. I guarantee that no blogger out there has provided the equivalent level of reporting to a general audience on the scale that us old-school dinosaur media outlets have for this story, or for that matter, any other major story.

Because before the story of gunpoint on the plaza in Belgrade means anything to you, you the reader have to know what’s going on, and why it’s going on. You yourself admitted that you read the NYT. So if it’s so bad, and blogs are so much better, then why read it at all? Clearly it serves a purpose to you and to it’s millions of other readers. I would argue that this blog is very complementary to this story in this case — if I want to hear a personal account of what’s going on by a Serbian who was there, here’s where I can do so — and that’s why I believe in blogs, and admire what you and GV does, but I don’t think that it can or should supplant the Big Bad MSM.

But I agree that there’s a lot that the Big Bad MSM can do to engage with its readership in the way of blogs and other new media.

And what are these papers doing to handle the crunch? Laying off people and using lots of wire copy. This is pushing people to the internet in an even more insidious fashion.
Even so-called major dailies in many cities have only one or two bylined stories on the front and the rest are AP’s version of the “main” story of the day. And this is the paper more likely on the doorstep of the average American.

That same average American has learned to ignore that paper for news since they already got that wire story via GoogleNews. Why still get it? Classified ads, arrest notices and micro-local news. This works for a really small paper but when big papers start gutting their regional bureaus for carpetbombing metropolitan area school boards there really aren’t any winners.

If you hope freelancing is making up some of the difference I hate to inform you but those budgets were the first ones slashed when corporate started the belt tightening. And if they aren’t using wire the <a href=”http://www.kleph.com/blog.php?v_blog_id=1&v_blog_entry_id=917″>sad state of foreign journalism that’s available doesn’t inspire a hell of a lot of enthusiasm either.

Newspapers have created this situation partially through their own bungling and misunderstanding of the situation. These rounds of staff cuts are only the latest in a decade-long cycle of attrition. Expect more next year as the revenue from all those campaign adds evaporates as well.

Which is sad. I love the immediacy of blogs and their ability to put you in touch with the events in the world as they occur. It’s a feeling I’ve experienced first hand on the other side of a huge event as well. The excitement of getting information out on a big story is just as amazing be it writing on your blog or finishing up the deadline on a newspaper story.

What blogs do not have is authority. The stature of a newspaper is due to its reputation and standing. So when you see a fact, or statistic or account of an incident it carries the standing of the paper’s authority behind it. No blog can match that nor should they try to. But, with newspapers increasingly clueless on how to capitalize on that the sad truth is we’ll become dependent on terse and bland wire copy for the raw facts on news events in the future.

But you’ll read it on the front page of tomorrow’s paper anyway. You don’t have any choice anymore.