It would be stupid to buy a newspaper. The Trib? The Sun-Times? Hell, the Reader and its fellow papers?
Journalists (I will irresponsibly use this as a synonym for “people who work in broadcast or print,” even though we’re all kind of journalists, which I will get to later) blame the bloggers (ditto, for people who work online). Bloggers blame the journalists. Everyone blames the economy, and management. Was it Ben Goldberger in the Blog with the Aggregator? Or was it Eric Zorn in the Newspaper with the Inverted Pyramid, or Sam Zell in the Boardroom with the ESOP?
(1) Should people write for free?
And I don’t mean to pick on Richard Roeper. Well, actually I do, but there are more grave examples. Take David Brooks. The New York Times, a while back, thought people might want to pay to read David Brooks, and then they thought otherwise. Here’s the thing about him: he’s a journalist who writes about economics and politics. This is in fact what most journalists are: they are journalists, by training, who have trained to write about areas of expertise. On the other hand, Brad DeLong is an economist who writes. (If Brad DeLong is too liberal for you, there are more conservative economists who write, too.)
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This does not of course mean that journalists are useless, only that some of them are, and that only fairly recently. Keep reading. I am not anywhere close to done.
(2) What is aggregation and why are journalists so angry about it?
