monk222 | The End of Newspapers?

Ms. Dowd is still beating the newspaper horse, as though she is really afraid that she is going to be out on the streets any month now. In this discussion she shares an interesting analogy:

Senator Kerry’s hearing tried to determine, in a metaphor that was whipped to death, whether there was any way to shut the barn door now that the ink-stained horse has gotten out into the virtual pasture (making readers pay for content now that they’ve gotten used to getting it free online).

David Simon, the creator of “The Wire,” who worked for 13 years as a Baltimore Sun reporter, testified that “high-end journalism is dying,” and when that happens, and no one is manning the cop shops and zoning boards, America will enter “a halcyon era for state and local political corruption.”

He said he thought the horse could be lured back into the barn. “I work in television now,” he said, “and no American, for the first 30 years of television, paid anything for their rabbit ears. Now they pay $60, $70 a month for better content.”

Of course, the Times actually tried this, and I was even one of the saps that paid (such being my devotion to the bosomy and witty Maureen Dowd), but it obviously didn't work. Presumably, you would have to get all the major papers and periodicals to agree not to let their stuff go online for free, but while the biggest players might easily sign onto that deal, the relatively weaker players would have their eyes set on moving in for the kill.

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Frank Rich also makes a hearty cry for the need to pay for reporters and journalists. He makes the pointed argument that we shouldn't be fooled by the pleasure of easy opinion writing, and that it is with professional journalists that scandals like Enron and the government's warrantless wiretappings are cracked:

We can’t know what is happening behind closed doors at corrupt, hard-to-penetrate institutions in Washington or Wall Street unless teams of reporters armed with the appropriate technical expertise and assiduously developed contacts are digging night and day. Those reporters have to eat and pay rent, whether they work for print, a TV network, a Web operation or some new bottom-up news organism we can’t yet imagine.... Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no mistake that in the end we will get what we pay for.

Now that information transmits so easily and freely, I suppose there is less incentive to spend a lot of time and energy digging for it. Bloggers, much less LJers, doubtlessly are a poor substitute, though I venture to wager that we will always be as effective as ever at catching celebrity upskirts.