It is a dark and stormy night

Since the UPS isn't charged up yet, blogging will be brief.

The Sacramento Bee has a Public Editor; his first column appeared on Sunday.

From Scott Rosenberg:

...The value journalists continue to provide in a
'disintermediated,' Net-enabled world -- when they are
doing their jobs right, of course -- is to continue to
ask public figures the uncomfortable questions that
they won't choose to answer on their own.

A PressThink comment:

The blogosphere, in large part, is simply taking over the role that second- and third-tier newspapers used to play in most cities and that alternative weeklies have played since then. Real-time fact checking is a potential blessing, but it pales compared to the fact checking that competitive media once exercised on each other.

BDL:

...one road reporters take--reporters who could, if we had a better system of molding them, turn out to be quite excellent--is one of Agnosticism: "I am a camera, and I simply report what people tell me, and I give greater authority to people who quickly return my phone calls and give me interesting quotes. I don't care about what's 'really going on' because that's a matter of opinion, and who knows anyway."
...Deliberate ignorance of the substantive matters one is covering...becomes a reporterial strategy: a way of (a) making your job easier, and (b) not getting any of your sources really mad at you.
...And by the end of the process of reporter-molding our reporter finds it bizarre and inexplicable that anybody actually cares about the substance of the issues.