What's the point of the traditional news media?

Following up on my post about the pointlessness of White House press briefings, I want to add something that might seem to go without saying, but that I think is too easy to forget: this is part of what traditional news reporting is. So when people bemoan the decline of traditional news media, you have to wonder how much value is actually there to be potentially lost.

If you watch Journeys with George, the documentary about the press covering Bush's 2000 campaign, you'll have a hard time taking traditional campaign reporting very seriously either.

Relatedly, Matthew Yglesias points out that a lot of what newspapers do doesn't provide enough of a benefit to society for a philanthropist to want to fund them:

The world is not currently lacking for sports coverage. Nor is there some kind of critical shortfall in people offering opinions about politics. Business reporting actually seems to have a viable economic model behind it. Similarly, lifestyle journalism continues to be viable in a number of formats. ...

[A] newspaper is a gigantic bundle of paper covering miscellaneous topics. The rationale for lumping all those topics into a single geographically-bound institution has to do with the economic logic of printing and distributing bundles of paper, and very little to do with the economic logic of producing and disseminating a digital media product.

Finally, Jonah Goldberg has a key insight about the history vs. the future of the news media:




Yeah, why don't we complain about the decline of the telegraph?

(Photo from Wikimedia Commons.)