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.”