All Umbrage All the Time

A reader logging on as KellyB last week posted a comment on a Politico.com story covering the funeral of former White House spokesman Tony Snow: "Rest in peace, Tony. You were a kind, decent soul on this earth for too short a time. May God always watch over your family." But KellyB couldn't resist amending the gracious condolence with this: "Politico.com—The Official Water Carrier of Barack H. Obama's Campaign."

How cordial. After a decade of waiting for the first "Internet election," it's finally here, and we're adrift from all the old-media moorings. "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one," the great critic A. J. Liebling wrote more than half a century ago. Today, of course, we're all press lords, or can be. But the "crowd-sourcing" of news cuts both ways. Like democracy itself, it can cleanse, correct and ennoble. Or it can coarsen, spread lies and degrade the national conversation.

Everything about the Web is double-edged. It's hard to believe, but YouTube wasn't even around in 2004. Now it (or other streamed video) is a godsend for anyone who wants to follow politics closely. But YouTube is also a pixilated guillotine for any public figures inclined to show a little humanity (that is, fallibility or a penchant for inconvenient truth-telling) when they step out of their house. Colin Powell told me recently that he's even had to put up with picture takers in the men's room.

Blogging is a good news/bad news story, too. Daily Kos held a convention last week in Texas full of self-congratulation. Like Thomas Paine and the ideological pamphleteers who provoked the American Revolution, bloggers help enliven and expand public debate. They are indispensable aggregators of political news.

But we're finding this works better for keeping on top of daily flaps than for learning genuinely new information. Bloggers rarely pick up the phone or go interview the middle-level bureaucrats who know the good stuff. It's a lot easier to chew over breaking stories and bash old media. Where do they get the information with which to bash? Often from, ahem, newspapers.

Which are shriveling this year. Talk is cheap and reporting is expensive. Anyone can sit at home pontificating in PJs (I've done it myself), but it costs nearly $1.5 million a year for a bureau in Baghdad. As newspapers lay off hundreds of reporters in the face of assaults on their classified advertising by the likes of Craigslist, who will actually dig for the news? A few sites (e.g., TalkingPointsMemo.com) are getting into the game. But eventually, Google and other search engines will have to form consortiums to subsidize the gathering of news. Otherwise there won't be anything worth searching for.

Print is moving rapidly in exactly the wrong direction. Take Sam Zell, new owner of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. In the name of "productivity," he wants print reporters to file a lot more stories that are much shorter. Just about the only comparative advantage print journalism retains is in well-reported stories too long to be comfortably read online.