A quick post — swinging unpleasantly between the obvious and the wrong — during the first morning break at the Whose News conference:

Don’t a lot of the MSM’s woes go back to their commitment to “coverage,” i.e., the idea that there’s a set of events that the MSM are morally and professionally obligated to report on, even if it’s not of particular interest to readers? That creates a bunch of news that no one wants to write and no few want to read. In contrast, bloggers, and Jon Stewart, get to talk only about we want to.

There’s a Postmodern point somewhere in this about the idea that there’s an independent world of Big Events, but leave that aside for the moment. It’s enough that papers feel an obligation to cover events that readers should care about, even if the readers don’t. I don’t dispute that. I don’t want news media to be guided only by reader interest if only because interests are responses more than they are inner states. I want there to be a record larger than my own interests. I want the opportunity to have my interests expanded and educated. And when some story I didn’t care about turns out to be tremendously important, I want to be able to go back through the archives (and not for $2.95 a pop, by the way) to learn what I didn’t know I needed to know.

I don’t know the economics of maintaining something like the AP, which is in the business of providing commoditized, miscellanized coverage. But I think we’re heading towards a time when we need the AP more than we need the NY Times. How much better would The Times be if it gave up on its obligation to provide “coverage”? Where will this infrastructure of miscellaneous stories come from? AP? WikiNews? Citizen journalists? Free-agent professional journalists? Free-agent editors? Everywhere and everyone?

Categories: Uncategorized dw