Philly

My parents have no reliable Internet access, and I didn't bring my non-working laptop, so I was cut off from the online world for a few days. Forced me to read the dreaded MSM again! Gadzooks!

Actually, I did notice something disappointing. I grew up reading and loving the Philadelphia Inquirer, particularly the Sunday front page, which would be filled with great national and international stories. These days the Inky is nothing but a wire service report. Practically every story in the entire front section was from the AP, with a few from the LA Times and other papers. I believe the Inquirer is part of the Knight-Ridder conglomerate, which includes 32 dailies, like the Philly Daily News, Miami Herald, and San Jose Mercury News. But there aren't even that many examples of cross-pollination between those papers. Mostly it's wire service stories. Dick Polman appears to be the only Washington beat reporter left. The local news and sports pages are a little more robust, but not by much.

In recent weeks the Knight-Ridder corporate board has been pressuring the company to sell its many newspaper holdings. Of course, falling circulation is seen as the culprit. But it seems to me that newspapers do a very good business online, where ad space can be another revenue stream. It seems to be they have done a poor job of creating ad partnerships between their offline and online media. The conglomeration of newspapers, along with the need for more and more profits doctated by corporate overlords, inevitably leads to cuts in the newsrooms, and you end up with once-proud papers like the Inquirer being made with a skeleton crew of typesetters. Even the LA Times and the NY Times are facing job cuts this year. It's enough to discourage actual journalism in this country. I'm not one of these blog triumphalists that believes in a new paradigm where the blogosphere becomes the new newspapers. But the constant focus on profits above content makes the whole MSM crappy media argument a self-fulfilling prophecy.