Greg Pilling

“One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs,” Mr. Mutter said. “They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.”

NY Times

I thought we were supposed to kill all the lawyers first? And how would he define this genocide of journalists? Surely the crap that spews out of my keyboard wouldn’t count, so I am safe right?

Rupert Murdoch is the face of change these days, and what an ugly face he has (just a personal opinion).  They want to start charging for news content, since the current newspaper business model is so flawed and will never make any money and has no future. I don’t think it will work however. I personally read the NYTimes.com site every couple of days because it has interesting content, but I think I would just move on to a different site if they wanted to charge me money. There are many alternatives after all – as Mr. Mutter noted in the quote above – who write interesting stuff on their own blogs and have the same qualifications as the people at NYTimes.

One noteable comment that I have heard is that all these blogs lack the resources to report global news effectively. There is no way a blogger in a spare bedroom in New Jersey can report on the scene from Baghdad for example. This is a valid critique, but ignores the secondary effect of that financial constraint.  The secondary effect is that a US blogger that wants to have some sort of report on the local goings on in Iraq will need to rely on the local bloggers in Iraq – voila! – instant foreign bureau. Also, since there is a local person reporting then the views will have a local flavor, not the current US bias that we get today.

As a Canadian living in the US, it was a culture shock to realize once I moved here how insular the US is. The news reporting seems to ignore the world at large (except for the current war zone) and pays little attention to the other 95% of the global population. This is contrasted with the generous foreign aid that the US provides to the world. A strange contrast. There is a couple of simple fixes of course – just watch BBC America and read news from foreign countries online. Also, look at a map once in a while and if there is a country there that you don’t know anything about, then do a Bing on it and find out something. A little unstructured self paced geography class.

But back to killing all the journalists – do it right after the lawyers and politicians. They deserve it more.