On Sat, Dec 17, 2005 at 07:37:37PM -0500, David Farber wrote:

Begin forwarded message:

From: Chris Beck <cbeck@pacanukeha.net> [...] I don't read papers in their printed form, but my experience with blogs and other new media news sources is that they cover what is apparently happening very well, but hidden stuff still seems to be revealed mostly by professional journalists who have the time and budget to travel, meet sources, &c. Notice that even in the one year gap in which the Times knew about this, it didn't explode on anyone's website.

Who new - the papers still serve a purpose :)

It's not so much that the papers serve a purpose as it is that they hire (and support with the resources of their organization) journalists. Largely, bloggers are not investigative journalists. Bloggers have a very good distribution network, and are excellent at getting out stories where the focus is either something public or something where a blogger has some sort of inside access stemming from their own personal situation. But bloggers don't often have large organizations behind them to defend their sources, which I'd expect would be a concern when you're blowing the whistle on a large secret government operation. This difference is key - it takes money and free time to do the footwork required to follow a story, verify it, research it, and defend it if need be, and most bloggers aren't professional bloggers, let alone professional journalists. It's a very small number of bloggers who have the resources, training, inclination, or connections/reputation to develop breaking news stories. In this discourse, we should definitely be drawing a distinction between news distribution and news origination. It's entirely possible that this will change in the next few years, but still - the stories have to come from somewhere. -- - Adam ** Expert Technical Project and Business Management **** System Performance Analysis and Architecture ****** [ http://www.everylastounce.com ] [ http://www.aquick.org/blog ] ............ Blog [ http://www.adamfields.com/resume.html ].. Experience [ http://www.flickr.com/photos/fields ] ... Photos [ http://www.aquicki.com/wiki ].............Wiki [ http://del.icio.us/fields ] ............. Links ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen@leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]