March 4 readings

I think the best point Joe Mathews (an alias, I'm sure) makes is that what's "bad" about papers today isn't what's there -- it's what's missing. The stories that newspapers can't afford to cover anymore is what hits the hardest, because investigative work is probably among the first to go because it's so expensive. Papers get flimsier because they can only afford short AP stories for national topics and a few reporters for shallow reporting of local ones.
Osnos hits the business model problem pretty well, actually, saying that certain groups have found niches that work and certain ones just haven't found the model yet. Summing it up, he says: "The equivalent mistake among newspapers was to start giving away information in the misbegotten belief that mass distribution would attract lucrative advertising." It's very true. We expect that advertisers will back the important aspect of the world that is News, or that people will pay for their service. Problem is, people don't tend to see it as a service. They expect it as a given part of their (hopefully, daily) lives. I'm going to equate it, however, with something else we are simply used to. Internet. We pay for internet in most cases. It tends to be a flat rate for a certain quality of internet, but nonetheless we pay. So why can't readers/users understand that money goes into creating the news, therefore money needs to be put back into it? I think that maybe as a collective news group, that's the best thing that can be communicated. As a whole, news organizations need to decide on a solid business model that works across mediums and across types of news publications/papers, etc. I feel like if you had to pay for each one, people may slowly get used to it at least and accept the new model.
As for the Hartford story, I agree with the fact that larger papers cannot do the same kind of reporting that a local, tied-in paper can do in its community. The problem is that those local papers are slowly losing people and resources, so that their in-depth local reporting is becoming scarce. Their one fighting aspect is losing out to the big stories from bigger papers. ProPublica is, as they say, filling a real need. They put together the need for investigative work and the small niche market (exposing corrupt and untrustworthy officials) on someone's dollar that's not the reader. The only thing I worry about is once it loses some of its newness and novelty, will it become more popular and do more good or will it fade away into news organizations no longer used?