Thank you for proving my point. The Guardian is one of Britain's top 3 broadsheets. (quality newspapers) Without the paper funding its website, it wouldn't be there. However, the link you specify is - once again - a feed that mixes AP/Reuters stories and the Guardian's own reporting. The newspaper's editors - who are paid not through the website's income, which is probably negligible, but through the money the newspaper makes - are the ones who make it a worthy read.
Click on one of the stories from the worldlatest site for once; see how after the location name at the beginning of the story it often says 'AP'? That's pure news coming from a news agency. The decent bits of that page are the written articles on the right-hand side of the page. Written by journalists. Paid for by the paper's income.
That's more or less the same as going to nytimes.com or washingtonpost.com - a mixture of instant news feed reporting and actual articles from the newspaper. Which was what my entire post was all about. :-)
Tony:
Quote:
Originally posted by Undertoad
Lastly, the BBC, NYT, Washington Post, etc. all post full unadulterated versions of their stories to the web, so I'm not missing anything.
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Sigh. That's what it's all about. Without the papers financing the actual WRITING of the decent articles and editorials, those articles wouldn't exist. Print isn't dead. The web is dead - it can't finance and pay the people who write all the good in-depth stuff. The web can't finance the Reuters and AP links - all the Reuters and AP people are paid by their news agencies because the newspapers and TV stations pay for the feeds (amongst other things).
Sure, Salon is a nice site and all. But it doesn't have independent news reporting, it doesn't have real correspondents, it takes a news feed like everybody else, and it is 100% pure unadulterated editorializing that you need to pay for. If you really want to pay aditional money to read somebody else's opinions on the web, go ahead. Oh, unless you are at school or work there. The federally mandated filtering software for public schools in the US almost always filters salon.com out. N2H2 and the likes. Maybe one too many hooker stories, I guess.
The examples you have about CNN etc. are nice - but all TV stations are owned by large commercial entities and need to *make money*. Newspapers can rely on much less temperamental advertising than TV stations. TV needs to cater to the lowest common denominator - the PATHETIC coverage CNN gave us when that plane crashed in Queens a couple of weeks ago is typical. Every second question was 'can you speculate on the possible causes of this as yet completely unknown event'; they were foaming at the mouth to imply terrorist activity, for something like ten hours non-stop. Without providing any information, any coverage - ANYTHING. Come on. CNN doesn't really employ journalists. The situation you describe with Amanpour is quite typical - don't you think it sounds just a wee bit staged? Have a look at
www.indymedia.org, if you really want commercially unbiased reporting.
Oh. Or have a look at
www.worldnews.com. Their current top story is about five Palestinian children being killed in an explosion on Thursday, and mourners being shot on. Where is CNN? They sure as hell would have a camera team floating around the scene if it were Israeli children who had been butchered.
CNN reports that.. oh.. how surprising 'Hamas vows revenge' is the headline. And they're talking about Hamas will avenge the death of their leader. The rest of the story is meaningless numbers, all scrunched together - a bunch of Palestinians were reported dead. No details, nothing. You wouldn't want to annoy anyone, would you? Have a look at cnn.com right now. Almost all the top stories in most categories are about the Taliban defeat and northern alliance victories, rah-rah.
Oh, sorry. The two top stories that aren't about the Taliban's defeat are titled 'True love overcomes anthrax scare' and 'Survey: Fewer Thanksgiving shoppers hit malls'.
Journalism? CNN? Jesus. Bite-sized info that's neatly pre-packaged and pre-chewed so as to not upset your viewing habits.
X.