From stone to bronze, the human cost in old media

This, to me, is the hoariest snag in any preachy "a mature blogosphere will supplant old media" argument. In the howling absence of all the essential, unglamorous work newspapers now do -- the fact-checking, interviewing, researching, all by experienced pros who know how to sift the human maelstrom better than anyone, and all hitched to 100+ years of hard-fought newsbrand credibility -- what's the new yardstick for integrity? On what do you base your choices? Some fickle mix of personal mood, blood-alcohol level, and how many followers your given source has on Twitter? Right.

I disagree with Winer in one huge way: When the professional news filters vanish, when you lose that vigorous center of storytelling expertise, you don't necessarily get a rich 'n' wonderful mix of new choices. You get chaos. You get noise. Sure, it might be a boatload of fun to read, but it's also maddening as hell.

Of course Morford is right. Nothing has yet arisen to replace the organization of fact hunters and checkers who research and verify what sees print in a newspaper. Working without a team paid to weigh and assess every word is writing without a net. Editors can leave rope burns on copy or strangle it outright, but more often they save writers from themselves.

In spite of their expertise and devotion to the truth, however, newspapers have too frequently failed us.Take the New York Times, the best of the best. Judith Miller's reporting on the Iraq War helped get us into that war. Those phantom Weapons of Mass Destruction? According to her, they were real. (Morford, on the other hand, got it right, early and often.)

In my own small case of online only, as a former member of a far less illustrious newspaper team than the NYT, I'm banking on readers to tell me when I'm wrong and to debate the debatable. So far,so good. Plus, change is inevitable.

Here's Mitchell and Webb on orientation day at the dawn of the Bronze Age. Stone chippers were not amused. (Thanks to Tim Appelo for link.)