Thursday, January 28, 2010

The Need for News

A post on Slashdot entitled, "Does Personalized News Lead To Ignorance?" points to a discussion between James Turner and Chris Lee:

I think the really interesting and kind of scary question is so just how much consumption of what we traditionally call news is still a requirement of citizenship [...], of being a productive member of a community.

There are those huge investigative things, but the truth is, with very few exceptions, nobody's doing that today. There are, maybe, the big national news organizations and some of this foundation-funded stuff that's starting. I think the bigger worry is the nuts and bolts. As you know, the meat and potatoes of daily journalism is that you've got to ask six people the same question; you've got to go to a council meeting. People get paid to do it for a reason.