The hard hitting reporters there tell it like it is.

yeah, it's a valid critique, but I am not sure journalism has become that jaded. As the great Les McCann song is titled: Compared To What? Hegelian dialectics somewhat pre-announces insufficiency according to the poorly plowed ground. We are the weeds we become. If you want flowers, take out the asparagus.

And it's called blogging. Newspapers FAILED after 9/11/01 to point out the hypocrisy and horror of the Bush the Lesser administrations.

A newspaper is good for lighting a barbecue. Not for gleaning any unbiased information from.

It's been like this for years. You so-called journalists are either obsessed with the completely trivial or busy proclaiming to us the Important Truths we figured out the better part of a decade ago. It's like the recording industry suddenly waking up and saying, "Duh! We should have been putting out quality music!" Quit phoning it in and tell us something we don't already know.

There are so many people who keep saying they know what the newspaper industry needs. They need to do more hard hitting journalism, cracking down on the lies of the right wing noise machine. Or, if your on the right, you think that they need to be pandering to the biases of their audience and only tell them what they want to hear. Regardless of whether or not it's true. I think the real cuprit is technology.

Look at the music industry, people aren't blaming the music itself for the decline in CD sales, they are placing the blame squarely where it belongs, on the internet and easy availability of music by other means. The news industry is suffering from the same problem. There are websites (your reading one now) that can give you whatever personal slant on the news you want for free. Why would you pay 50 cents, or whatever a daily paper costs now, a day to hear someone else's perspective on the news?

I really do think this is a buggy whip/automobile problem that can't be fixed internally. One medium will simply replace another. The papers will just have to learn to adapt. Though better reporting would be nice, I don't think that is the root problem. Television is having the same issues.

My observations come from the fringes of the inside. I’m currently the editor of suburban Dallas weekly; I started my career at a small, community-level daily.

First, without being snarky, David, it is true that news quality has been on decline for well before 9/11. When Jeff Gerth wasn’t writing no-story stories about Whitewater, other media stories were putting Clinton on the celebrity pedestal.

Second, there’s been other internal self-shootings besides the ones you mentioned.

Biggest of these was already a decade or so ago, when big newspaper owners, CEOs and boards refused to accept that the days of the 30 percent profit margin, which they seemed to think was a divine right, were going away never to return.

That, then, caused cuts not only in local writers and editors, but folks like copy editors, which can affect quality.

(At the same time, seven-day dailies had fat they could have cut earlier. Nobody short of movie fanatics probably care if the review of a new movie was locally generated or not.)

That said, you take the Internet too lightly, David. Papers now whore after crumbs of ad revenue on it, even though, last year, by percentage, online ad revenue declined more than hardcopy revenue.

Why? Internet ads and money are like the Red River in West Texas in summer — a mile wide but just an inch deep.

Between pop-up blockers and a regularly updated hosts file, I don’t even see a lot of online ads. So, online ad designers create more obnoxious ones, while the folks at Firefox et al up their ad-blocking skills.

(BTW, that’s another reason not to use Google Chrome, IMO. Google has a vested interest in its’ ad-blocking capability being “leaky.”)

Oh, and both big dailies and alt-weeklies have seen BIG classified ad losses to Craigslist.

The current system, for big dailies at least, probably is broken beyond viable repair. Community newspapers, and special/niche papers, such as those for gays or other interest groups, blacks or other socio-ethnic groups, and Spanish-language or other non-English ones will do better. But even that is a relative term.

So, David, the problem is a lot more multifaceted than you would have it.

we all figured it out. you are of the enemy.

don't let the door slap you on the ass.

In my town (Orlando) the daily newspaper has been in the hands of the conservative establishment. Its editorials almost unilaterally supported Bush and the Republican establishment. It also refused to look at the city's mayor and city council, who destroyed much of downtown's established buildings for specious "improvement" projects for the mayor's buddies.

Meanwhile, the only alternative is a free weekly paper. It's in the hands of snarky, cynical writers who in their weekly columns talk about their drinking, drugging and ambisexual lifestyles. But they also cover the city's business far better and more critically than the daily paper. They point out corruption and lies, the incursion of right-wing preachers into public affairs, and smart coverage of the local arts and music scene.

Sadly, because it is an anti-establishment paper, the weekly can't get major advertisers. They had to limit movie reviews because theater chains were pulling their advertising too often. Their main ad clients seem to be gay dating services, tattoo parlors, drug rehab clinics, topless dance joints and expensive trendy nightclubs. And as further harassment, the weekly's personnel were arrested for supposedly accepting ads for a prostitution ring; this happened after a series of articles about police corruption and sadism. (The arrest turned out to be meritless. Gee, what a surprise.)

It's sad to think that non-syncopantic journalism relies on the sleaziest sponsors on earth. But the honest, upright businessmen of my community want suck-up write-ups in the daily paper, not someone who would call them on the carpet for their misdeeds.