Warren Buffett "would not buy (newspapers) at any price"

"People will just get their news elsewhere! You known, from all those fucking blogs and sites like "the google" who make rounds and rounds of cop calls and attend city council meetings to make sure no one is dumping lead paint into your well water.

So tired of people saying "people are just getting their news elsewhere." Yes, they're getting it elsewhere from people who are grabbing original reporting and giving it their "take" and then posting it between pictures of Kate Perry's tits.

Hey readers! Glad you continue to thumb your nose at the mainstream media and visit my site! Here's my take on this NYT story about what's going on in Tikrit. I bet it was reported from a balcony in Amman. Anyway, I can't read the Times anymore because it has so much bias, so if I want to read about what's going on in Iraq, I'll just Google it."

Double Down, that post gets my vote for best of the year. Just beautifully done.

 

Is this really what you think of blogs?

Your fundamental point - that bloggers rely on the original reporting they're getting free - is a good one. But this is a pretty bad caricature of the political/foreign affairs blogosphere.

 

A-fucking-men

 

DD, I don't mean to criticize you in particular. But I'm frequently frustrated by the antiblogism - soon you'll be saying they should have their own SCHOOLS! - on the board. What happens here, and what I thought your message exemplified, is the equivalent of people saying they're mocking "newspapers" when they're really mocking the New York Post or something. In other words: You're not talking about "blogs," there...you're talking about the worst of blogs.

I have 15 blogs in the Middle East/Foreign Affairs section of my RSS reader. (Yes yes, congratulations to me.) Each one of them is written by an expert of some sort - a long-time journalist, an Iranian professor, a dissident, a U.S. military scholar, a scholarly ex-Marine, and so on and so on. Not one of the 15 comes even close to conforming to the cartoonish descriptions of blogs that appear to predominate here. Nor do the liberal blogs I read, nor do the conservative blogs I read, nor the feminist blogs, environmentalist blogs, economics blogs...

Honestly, listening to SportsJournalists.com-ers talk about blogs is like listening to many Republican politicians these days talk about America. I just want to shake both groups of you and say, "It's not...like that!"

There are problems with blogs. Blogs can never replace newspapers. Blogs rely on original newspaper reporting. Yes yes yes. But we can't have a good discussion on them unless we talk about them fairly.

 

In the previous generation, those voices you refer to would have found their place in newspapers. However, it is easier now to be a lone wolf and do it without journalistic safeguards.

Yes, safeguards -- of fairness, of libel.

And the fact that people will give all those voices as much credence as today's professional print journalist is another major reason newspapers are sinking slowly into the sunset. So, no, I won't give blogs too much positive credit.