Breaking the News

BREAKING THE NEWS
[SOURCE: Mother Jones, AUTHOR: Eric Klinenberg]
While our democratic culture could survive the loss of the daily newspaper as we know it, it would be endangered without the kinds of reporting that it provides, writes Eric Klinenberg. "Even in the online era, more than 60% of Americans say they read a local newspaper daily or several times a week. And with good reason: Few of the cable channels and websites that newspaper chains claim as competitors actually provide original news and information. Cable networks do virtually no local reporting of their own, and while bloggers do a good job exposing journalistic lapses, they generally aren't doing the muckraking, beat reporting, and pavement pounding that generate news." (Much more on journalism -- and the media ownership debate -- at the URL below.)
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/03/breaking_the_news.html

* The Race
Robert Kuttner believes newspapers have started down a financially and journalistically viable path of becoming hybrids -- part web, part print. "Assuming that most dailies survive the transition, my guess is that in twenty-five years they will be mostly digital; that even people like me of the pre-Internet generation will be largely won over by ingenious devices like Times Reader, supplemented by news alerts, RSS feeds, and God knows what else."
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2007/2/Kuttner.asp