More Washington news, fewer journalists

This may turn out to be good for the media. They may have to report the important matters and have less repoters to cover Spears, and Hilton. When Barney biting a reporter is news...it definately could be an improvement.

That is the fallout from the elevation, to even loftier heights, of the Almighty Dollar !! Let them eat cake, is the corporate war-cry, at the moment !! We don't want an educated, or informed, electorate, they wouldn't elect the likes of another President Bush. Two Bush Presidencies already, have been bad for our nation's health !!
Now, if the media, especially the print media, were doing it's job, professionally and honesty, I really doubt, we would have had, even one Bush Presidency !! That is life in present-day, Corporate America, where even the news is skewed !!
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS, BRING THEM HOME, ALIVE AND WHOLE. NOW.

Bill R., the opposite is happening, at least in the Tribune. Haven't you noticed the proliferation of celebrity-fueled "news" since the Trib's redesign? That fluffy stuff, which the stringers can pick up from blogs and news services, is taking up a lot of space, while the hard news is taking a back seat.

I wonder if anyone will be able to pick up an honest-to-goodness newspaper in this country in a few years. I don't want to read too many "woe be us" stories written by reporters, since just about everyone's in the same boat to some degree, but I fear for the future of the news business. An economic recovery may not save it, and blogs aren't really ready to step in and take newspapers' place in the information marketplace.

It seems to me that the answer is obvious, quit giving your product away on the internet. I'd be willing to pay a fee to read the Tribune. I already pay a fee to read the New York Times op-ed columnists.

It's very important that the news industry not just survive, but be robust and independent. The 4th Estate isn't a luxury, it's a vital watchdog that we cannot do without.

Jack Schafer at Slate.com has a comment on whining journalists that is worth reading:

"The misery of a laid-off or bought-out journalist isn't greater than that of a sacked bond trader, a RIF-ed clerk, or a fired autoworker. The only reason we're so well-informed about journalists' suffering is they have easy access to a megaphone."

See the whole article at http://www.slate.com/id/2206854/

"Starve the beast" has a corollary:
"starve the press".

The most sensational stories, e.g., Blago, will still be covered.

Don't expect any coverage of guys like Madoff, however, until the house of cards has collapsed and some Hollywood mogul has been burned.

Doug, I agree in principle that a news media is important to a democracy. Unfortunately, most in the media tonight are corrupt. When 90 percent of those in the mainstream media are liberal, far left, Democrat, and then they spend their time looking the other way to their party of choice, then the media is just as much a part of the problem. Let's look at the Blago mess and it just isn't Blago. Illinois politics has been corrupt for decades. Chicago and Cook County politics has been corrupt for decades. While the news media is railing against our current governor, the problem goes beyond Blago. The Democratic machine that runs Chicago, Cook County and now Illinois is rooted and rife with corruption. For the most part, the Chicago media has looked the other way and even supported that corruption via endorsements.
There are multiple mainstream media folk who have now taken jobs with the Obama administration, the biggest name being Time Magazine's Washington Bureau Chief, who just took a job as Biden's chief spokesman. Former Tribunite, and the man who dictates the Tribune's coverage of Barack Obama, David Axelrod, is one of Obama's closest advisors. See a pattern???

Oh, John D---Blago is merely a piker compared to Cheney, Bush, Rice, Wolfowitz, Powell, et. al.
Capitalism is in its death rattle. We need to look at countries like Finland with cradle to grave health care and find a way to get the MIlitary Industrial Complex off the public teat.

Hope the news companies weeded out the liberals so America can get the truth.
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John D.,

Please site some facts. Which MSM journalists do you regard as far left and why? I trust you'll agree there's a disctinction between a difference of opinion and being a communist or a fascist.

I often don't agree with Charles Kraulthammer or Bill Kristol but I don't think that makes them fascists. When Kathleen Parker and George Will wrote that Sarah Palin wasn't ready to be veep, Kathleen Parker got threatened with her life by some on the right.

Bill R., the opposite is happening, at least in the Tribune. Haven't you noticed the proliferation of celebrity-fueled "news" since the Trib's redesign? That fluffy stuff, which the stringers can pick up from blogs and news services, is taking up a lot of space, while the hard news is taking a back seat.

I wonder if anyone will be able to pick up an honest-to-goodness newspaper in this country in a few years. I don't want to read too many "woe be us" stories written by reporters, since just about everyone's in the same boat to some degree, but I fear for the future of the news business. An economic recovery may not save it, and blogs aren't really ready to step in and take newspapers' place in the information marketplace.

Posted by: Heron | December 18, 2008 8:46 AM

You gentlemen have a good point. Me get my news off of the foreign web sites,gave up on American news papers long time ago.

The news media being biased to any party is the biggest myth out there. They simply are not. A big "grow the blank up" to anyone that thinks otherwise. For every example one can point out of an alleged biased, one can point out an equal oposite biased.

Heron, I agree with you, and sorry Bill, but I do not agree with you this time. The swamp (and others) have turned into a sensationalist form of excapism for many, and the news agencies have catared to this. I look at the swamp here as to which stories get the most posts.....it's the ones that use flashpoints, and not real news. I would be curious if James could do a follow up on this article and cite which type of articles get read more here. I would imagine that the blago/ palin/ birth cert/ dog stories show up better on the search engines and thus get read more here. When those stupid stories show up here, I see poster names that I never have seen before. These stories create more web traffic, thus increasing their google rank, thus increas how much the Trib can charge for advertising.

I wish I had a good answer as to how to get rid of this cycle. PBS/ NPR has done it with their model of blending corporate advertising with private advertising.

I would like to see the swamp turn into the Newshour/ MTP of the online world. Only focus on real news, and cover it well. Leave the silly stories to the ones that will fall or to TMZ etc. If they want to play the censorship game, block posts that do not make sense, like most of inky's, as most of my posts that get blocked have a dig at his intellect, but really it is a reflection on the swamp for allowing that stupidity to be posted. I see he is at least starting to make an attempt at sentence formation and spelling words, but his comments (and many like his) do not enlighten anybody here, and they waste bandwidth and time.

Likewise, I guess I could care less what so many people think here. Every warm body has a thought. There are is a core of maybe 20 people here that post make intelligent posts. I would like posters here (with some policy from the swamp) to list references when bringing up controversial matter.

I could go on and on about this subject. The last paragraph is the reason why I can not tollerate the big blogs like USA Today, or MSNBC, or CBS, ABC, etc. There is no sense of community there and it is impossible to have a dialog with author, and other posters.

Posted by: Xcellentform | December 18, 2008 11:14 AM
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I pretty much agree with everything you said. I'm not sure how long you've been reading and posting, but FYI, the traffic here has fallen off dramatically in the last year or so. And that seems to be coterminous with a severe tightening of the monitoring.
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When I was first posting, most of the comments went up -- VERY slowly -- but they went up. Now EVERYBODY complains that 1/3 to 1/2 of their comments just disappear for no apparent reason.
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So it's no surprise that many of the regulars from a year or so ago have dropped out and new posters give up quickly. A few of the dedicated (and emotionally unhinged) remain... not sure which category I fit, but I post less and I'm close to giving up altogether.
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So it seems that the Keepers of The Swamp noticed the fall in traffic and decided to remedy that with more sensationalism.
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Well, Silva, James & Co, I guess that's some kind of a "fix", but not a very good one. Traffic is spotty, and getting a conversation going is problematic at best. I (and others) have said that the obvious way to go is instantaneous posting, with an obscenities filter and a "Report Abuse" button. If you find that unacceptable, then at least go back to what it was before. You won't have to rely heavily on sensationalism and the traffic will increase.
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Please let this post go up.

MJ,

Mark and I appreciate your comments and concerns. Last year, we handed over the screening of comments to a third party, that's why you and others have noticed a difference. There are different people screening at the shop we use and some of them have a tighter screen for comments than others or than Mark and I do. We have talked with them about loosening up and may need to do so again.

You are right that traffic has fallen off. There are different reasons for this but certainly one of them has to be some readers giving up because of the moderating issues.

We're trying to get a handle on a lot of issues, as you can imagine. All I can ask is that you don't give up on us.

Frank

Posted by: Frank James | December 19, 2008 7:36 AM
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Frank,
Thanks much. That explains things. And actually I noticed the monitoring loosen very recently, but i wasn't sure if I was just lucky or if the monitoring improved.

Frank, one easy thing you could do to boost traffic is to get the Trib to post a blurb ahead of time when you're going to live blog a press conference or political event. I've stumbled into the live blogs, but knowing about them in advance would encourage me to come back at the proper time.

Did the traffic on here start going down shortly after the Trib's redesign? The fact that the paper feels less substantial now may be bringing fewer people to the website.

Having said that, I must admit that the smaller number of people who remark on posts in here makes your blog more attractive to me than the Times' political blog. It feels a lot more manageable to read. I like the more-frequent posts, too.

When the primaries against Hillary got hot & heavy, she was able to infiltrate the "moderators" on Huffington Post and if you said anything bad about the Goldwater Girl more than once, and they were on duty, they found a way to ban you.

I'm so glad she lost.

Here if something were deleted, I sometimes had the impression whoever did it might be stealing your thought for their own use elsewhere.