The last legs of the old media

By Brian Kirwin | Monday, May 18th, 2009 | Catch-All

I remember when this blogging phenomenon got started and listened to media professionals snidely sneer at bloggers with an attitude of “the Press does the hard work of reporting and bloggers sit back and comment on what we report.”

Oh, how the winds have shifted.

With fewer and fewer people willing to shell out a buck a day for what is easily read for free, revenues are low, reporters are laid off, and those who remain are cutting corners.

Shaun Kenney disagrees, arguing that the Press is moving towards more investigative journalism based on demand.

Anecdotal evidence is showing that the reaction of the MSM isn’t to become more “blog-gy” in most regards, but to step up the in-depth reporting. The New Yorker, UK Economist, and Newsweek are all leaning in this direction by boosting subscription prices, using the web to either drive people to these interest stories or to react quickly to events.

Quality is reserved; the rest is left to the bottomfeeders.

I see much more evidence to the contrary.

2009 will be the first recession election in the new media age, and the cracks are already showing in the mainstream media’s ivory tower.

Maureen Dowd, columnist of the New York Slimes….er, Times, had to admit she PLAGIARIZED from a blogger (here).

The Washington Post needs a blogger with a recorder at a local GOP meeting to cover a political story in Virginia. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

And of course, here in Hampton Roads we have the local Virginian-Pilot editorial board doing yet another editorial on the need for more unemployment benefits.

There must be a prize for editorial board that writes the most editorials about the same subject, somehow hoping that their math makes sense.

THE REAL STORY – Only about 8,000 people out of Virginia’s 7,769,089 population would get the stimulus part-time unemployment checks. That’s a whopping one-tenth of one percent!

Those are the Democratic administrations own numbers. The Democrats and the Virginian-Pilot editorial board (excuse my redundancy) are relentlessly hammering an issue over 00.1% of Virginians.

No wonder the other 99.9% aren’t as excited about the issue. I imagine roughly the same proportions of excitement exist over the mainstream media’s writing.

The Pilot editorial board’s incessant whining about unemployment benefits has become as reliable a page feature as “I have a bad feeling about this” in Star Wars films or as a buxom teen blonde in a horror film grabbing a flashlight to check out a darkened basement.

I sympathize. If anything makes sense in the mainstream media’s current freefall, it’s the fixation of its writers on unemployment benefits.

Of course, yet again, the Pilot doesn’t mention that the jobless benefits hinge on part-time workers when they whine and opine. Must be an insignificant detail to them.

Like Maureen Dowd citing a publishes source when she lifted a whole paragraph.

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