I think Boriss’ argument ultimately fails because he misunderstands what big-city daily journalists actually do.
He thinks all reporters are simply “repeaters,” telling you the game score, the number of dead in the air crash, the name of governor caught canoodling and so on.
Basically, “event news” is written by wire reporters, who are more like “repeaters”–although there is more skill in this than Boriss seems to admit.
Small town papers and most weeklys are also repeaters in Boriss’ terms. They tell you whether the zoning board decided to let the car wash expand and so on.
But most big-city dailies have reporters who work beats. Their job is not to cover events, but to develop sources and break news. Would unpaid bloggers spend thousands of dollars wining and dining staffers are city hall or the defense department–just to learn how the institution works and where to squeeze to get stories no one else has? These beat reporters are also the guys who comb through miles of documents to find surprising trends or criminal malfeasance.Remember “computer-aided reporting”? They also have the experience and a fully powered b.s. detector to challenge public officials. They turn down a lot of phony stories. And by and large, they do a pretty good job that no blogger seems prepared to do yet.
In other words, these reporters are more like “editors/aggregators” in Boriss’ world. But once you grasp that, his argument collapses. Because even he admits we need more “editors/aggregators.”
Are there some bad apples? Yep. And the web helps us spot them faster. But bad doctors and bad lawyers are not weeded out.
