Long audio: Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman talk about the newspaper business. Chuck argues that newspapers should have started charging from the beginning, that the internet is not a meritocracy, and that the best newspaper strategy would have been to write longer. The best counter-arguments out there right now: Clay Shirky's Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable and Steven Berlin Johnson's Old Growth Media And The Future Of News (his SXSW speech).
Shirky's right about it all except for one thing -- the we need "journalism."
We don't -- or rather we don't need the sort of journalism that is traditional, the sort that mediates and filters, the sort that beings with "Experts say..."
The experts are already on the web, speaking directly to the consumer. I don't need Gretchen Morgensen of the times to tell me about the mortgage market--I can go to Calculated Risk. I don't need David Leonhardt to tell me about the economy: I can go to Nourel Roubini. Craigslist and Google News may severely injured the newspaper and the network news program, but its the incompentence/mendacity of its practitioners -- the Jayson Blairs, the Dan Rathers -- who wield the death blow.
posted by Karl K at 10:32 PM on March 19, 2009 
I thought it was funny that the whole conversation practically ran like a series of blog or forum thread comments, with everything from trolling and baiting over personal issues, and going way off topic and then veering back at the end.
posted by dave at 9:54 AM on March 21, 2009
@karl k...
this is such a naive take. journalism can obviously mean a lot of things, but in its best sense is infinitely more complicated than retreading primary documents. the journalist=lier trope is a product of the early internet age. methinks we will live to regret it--especially as the internet morphs into the ultimate product-dispensing trashbin that we can't escape...
posted by jSon at 9:33 AM on March 22, 2009
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