Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.
Actually Maureen Dowd had a good quote about this in her latest column:
David Simon, the creator of “The Wire,” who worked for 13 years as a Baltimore Sun reporter, testified that “high-end journalism is dying,” and when that happens, and no one is manning the cop shops and zoning boards, America will enter “a halcyon era for state and local political corruption.”
He said he thought the horse could be lured back into the barn. “I work in television now,” he said, “and no American, for the first 30 years of television, paid anything for their rabbit ears. Now they pay $60, $70 a month for better content.”
The keywords being: "better content." Most of today's "high journalism" is mediocre at best and crap at worst, and bloggers and wiki-producers like this student are exposing its failings every day. People paid for it when it had no competition. Now it does, and free competition at that. To add insult to injury, its habitual (now open) liberal bias drives away half the audience.
In contrast, the WSJ, which does provide better content, is holding its own with a successful, increasing subscriber model. If it's good people will pay.
If HBO just showed reruns of ABC nobody would pay for HBO either. |
