Broadcast media can get face time with people who are normally inaccessible to Joe Blogger, and they have a background organisation that means they can have people on the ground where things happen.
They also have two major disadvantages: Lack of specific expertise and lack of feedback.
The lack of expertise is easy to understand: Newspapers cannot keep a panoply of technical experts on permanent retainer. There will invariably be somebody somewhere on the 'net, outside the newspapers' own organisations, with greater on-the-ground experience and competence in whatever subject the newspaper writes about.
The lack of (easy) feedback channels is partly a cultural thing - there is, frankly, an arrogance in the attitude of a lot of newsies towards non-journalists and towards content that eludes (their) editorial control. But it is also a matter of logistics: In a newspaper, it is impossible to amend a comment thread to every article, relegating commentary to LTEs, which is a format that does not facilitate real dialogue and in-depth critiques (because point and counterpoint are so separated in time and space).
Additionally, current newspaper online operations suffer from an entirely self-imposed handicap: They fail to link to other sites. This is largely because of a belief that linking to other sites will mean that people go to those external sites instead of going to another node on their own site. This deals a one-two punch to 'net editions of newspapers: First, it means that their articles become dead ends. And when I reach a dead end while surfing, I back up a step and find another link. Second, it hurts their credibility, because it makes it harder to verify their claims and track down their sources.
In an age of hyperlink markup, when you write about - say - some new study of the health effects of bananas, you're expected to link to the study [note: To the study. Not to some damn press release], so people can go read it themselves and see if you've screwed up your reporting.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Small steps, but in an interesting direction. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
It seems to me that under the old system, the conventional mainstream press--including the AP, BBC, AFP, etc., and the traditional newspapers who could afford their own reporters--did a pretty good job of covering what was going on. Obviously they can't report on something if they can't get there (like Iraq during the past couple of years) or if nobody cares about it (like Africa pretty much all of the time), but it's better than no news at all. Which is what I'm afraid we're in for as the traditional funding models fail...
