There are plenty of high-profile examples of serious problems with MSM: Jayson Blair (NYT), Stephen Glass (New Republic), Jack Kelley (USA Today), Dan Rather (CBS), Janet Cooke (Washington Post) the psychics and profilers the TV news networks to bring in to fill 24 hours, the coverage of the lead up to the Iraq War.

Most newsrooms aren’t set up to fact check articles; the editing process is mostly focused around grammar, punctuation and style. It’s too often about the chase for the front page story.

Many MSM reporters know very little about the topics that they write about. They interview a few people and then string together a story with A said, then B said, then C said.

While there are certainly bloggers who are “high school student just ranting about the way they feel with no research,” there are also bloggers that are experts in their field. These are the people that the MSM go to when they’re seeking quotes and insights. Their day job revolves around the topics they write about.

On my blog, I put my credentials in the sidebar of every page. Most of the topics that I write about, I work on in my day job. If a story relies on external sources, I link to them so you can see if your conclusion agrees with mine. If you have a question about something I wrote or you disagree with me, you can say so.

It’s up to you to take those inputs and determine whether you trust me.

A generation who can’t unplug because their sense of self is so undeveloped that it depends entirely on constant, electronic feedback.

When it comes to tech coverage, a lot of it is a rehash (with added inaccuracies) from the blogosphere by reporters who don’t understand what they’re writing about.

They’ve abdicated coverage of key local issues. When Virgin America launched, the Chron didn’t have a reporter on the first flights. Engadget and WIRED both did. The airline is set to be a major employer in the San Francisco area. Not to mention of geeky interest to the Chron audience.

I wrote an analysis of this earlier:
http://blog.agr...s-chron-doesnt/

Politics coverage is mostly polls. The media continue to do national polls because they’re cheap, easy and provide lots of data that can be talked about endlessly. Never mind that given our system of government, national polls are meaningless. There is NOT ONE race that is decided in a national election.

Local TV news is a vapid pit of the crime of the day, packaged network content and straight-from-the-publicist video news releases (because they’re free). You will be more informed watching The Daily Show than watching local TV news.

The shoddy reporting leading up to the Iraq War, ignoring the mortgage bubble, Jayson Blair and Judith Miller don’t help either.

All that said, I worry about who is going to fund serious investigative reporting going forward. Part of the good of bundling is that it has allowed news outlets to fund longer projects that wouldn’t survive on their own. And by “serious investigative reporting,” I don’t mean To Catch A Predator.

Who is going to pay the next Woodward and Bernstein to investigate a “third rate burglary?”

Some of this may happen by inside sources with documents, pictures and videos leaking them on YouTube or to blogs. (Smoking Gun comes to mind.) But a lot of it will disappear. A lot of it already has.

No it doesn’t. Back in the late 90s I stopped using a commissioned travel agent to book my flights. It made me smarter, by forcing me to learn the ins and outs of the airline industry via Travelocity. Not travel agents are all but extinct. Zillow is allowing me to no longer need a commissioned real estate agent.

So, people powered news, which I always take with a grain of salt and research further if I think the subject warrants it, is making me smarter. I don’t need some arrogant pseudo- journalist telling me what is “news” anymore.

“mainstream” media is having just as difficult a time accepting their fate as travel and real estate agents – they have lost all their relevancy.

This study only took a snapshot of three sites for five days. I don’t even know how you can call this a “study”. It’s a skewed observation in my opinion…

Last weekend my blog had the most hits ever in one day by a factor of seven, as my blog post on Eight steps to thriving on information overload was featured first on Lifehacker, and was in turn featured on……

Nicholas Carr writes about the crowd selecting dumber news in Digg et al than the smart editors in mainstream media. Nicholas, you don’t have to read Diggs home page! There is more in citizen journalism than the top diggs, reddits…

But you’ll also find reports about LOLcats or other stuff.

This isn’t necessarily bad, or anything. I could also imagine that niche-sites could compete with Digg, if they tried to _not_ become a tabloid paper, but that can only be guaranteed, if they manage to gather a certain meritocratic elite. It should be possible, though.

But you’re right, this doesn’t mean that people become dump because of the iPhone unlock-article or whatever. It just means that the vast majority of articles will on the long term be primarily entertaining (an article about Putin, who is considered “bad”, what is right in my opinion anyway, can definitely be entertaining) rather than “informative”.

I read newspapers which contain articles that would never find their way to the Digg front page. And this is the point. It’s not about high-profile media, it’s about the new tabloid paper.
And considering how successful tabloids are in “real life”, Digg (and others) has good chances of becoming exactly that and be very profitable with it.

http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com

The thing is, almost everybody with the exception of PEJ (and probably some news orgs) has figured out that Digg, Reddit, et. al. are social news sites (what’s with that “user news” term?? more hothouse-ivory tower subterfuge?) and are not much of an indication of news habits of the world outside of their own communities. And, even at those sites, there’s no way to determine the totality of news consuming habits of community members. Perhaps we’re only seeing a fraction of what some of those community members read on a regular basis–because ranking those stories fits the parameters and social milieu of those sites.

The study serves only to make bleedingly obvious to a certain cadre of C-level journalism executives what most of us have either known or figured out since the launch of social news–that lots of people like to find obscure things and share them with one another. Gee, wasn’t that one of the reasons people started blogging in the first place?

Nothing new to see in this study, folks…move along….

@Alaska – sorry to disappoint.

This is simply capitalism at work, it applies to journalism as well.

Do you actually believe we live in a free society? What planet have you been living on?

The PEJ and its ilk like to create false dichotomies, mostly because they’re in a panic about the state of the newspaper industry and are looking to assign blame elsewhere. But checking out engadget (or whatever) every once in a while doesn’t mean a lot of us don’t still go to nytimes.com regularly. Different sites, different media, serving different purposes — they all can, and will, coexist. The details will get worked out pragmatically as we figure out what is still a very young medium.