re: #727 SixDegrees
Well I certainly understand your point

Those aren’t the problems I raised. I wasn’t talking about shitty reporting, which is certainly a problem. But it’s another problem, unrelated to the potential loss of historical documentation that the loss of mass-printed information brings. Or to the problem that with the demise of newspapers comes the demise of nearly all actual reporting, good or bad.

[emphasis added realwest] but I question the value of the loss of historically inaccurate documentation. Charles gave an interview on PJMTV a few weeks or so ago, in which he pretty much blamed the drop in circulation in Newspapers on their undeniable left wing bias, not JUST in their Opinion/Editorial pages, but in the reporting of the news as well. He went on to say that “on-line” versions of Newspapers still faced the same problem: how to make money when your viewers don’t really trust what you report to be accurate.
And I think part of the newspaper business going down is the unfortunate reliance on AP, AFP and Reuters as opposed to having their own boots in the field so to speak. And no, I don’t mean the Detroit Free Press, I mean the NYT, WaPo, LATimes, Chicago Tribune and the like. Even without biased and untrustworthy reporting, they just can’t compete with TV news (iirc, the reason CNN was such a hit in it’s early years was that it did in fact put it’s boots on the ground - e.g., being in Baghdad when the air assault started and reporting LIVE from the scene).
And, for what little it’s worth, Charles broke open Rathergate - a clear attempt by CBS to swing voters from Bush to Kerry - by using technology to bust ‘em; the TANG memo’s were fake, but weren’t intended to be published the way you’d expect a newspaper to do it, but Charles got hold of the TANG memo, opened up a pc on it’s default settings and reproduced the TANG memo character by character - the “trobbing memo”.
So while a part of me will miss newspapers (and I don’t think they will ever go completely away, but their influence will certainly wane) I will not miss all of the inaccurate, incomplete and biased reporting that comes with them.