Wait, I thought bloggers were media people ... aren't you guys real?

Preaching to the choir.

So... would bloggers not have figured this out sooner or later? I would imagine that these salaries were a matter of public record.

I don't want to see papers go down the tubes either, but you're implying that there would be no watchdog at all if they disappear, and that's patently illogical.

What suburb of 38,000 DOES have a serious newspaper? People in Bell, which is wholly surrounded by other LA suburbs, who want to read a paper get the LA Times, just like they and their neighbors always have.

I've never seen a suburban city paper publish investigative journalism. They're usually more like a Little Nickel, with announcements.

Mission Accomplished!

This is not what a world without newspapers looks like. It's what a world without JOURNALISM looks like.

It'not that they were paid too much. It's that everybody else is paid too little! Roll that in your paper and smoke it!

@ 4. Off the top of my head: Bainbridge Island (pop 20,000) and Bremerton (pop 37,000), both of whose papers have been known to file a FOIA request or two in their time.

@ 3. No, I don't believe they would have. Especially since the promise of bloggers is that they would be faster, nimbler, and more locally directed than huge, awkward, blunderbuss newspapers--a swarm of diligent mavericks getting into all the nooks and crannies of public life. That promise is not being fulfilled.

Gotta agree with @7 here. It's not about newspapers, it's about journalism. The problem is that no one's figured out how to make enough money without a print product to fund expensive investigative journalism as well as with one.

Arguments like these will make no difference and will not stop newspapers from being a dying technology. Instead we should be working on how to fund and distribute quality journalism without newspapers.

@ 7 gets much more to the heart of the matter than I did. I think that that's what you need to take to heart, Brendan.

Well, in this instance (and many others), newspapers are bringing the journalism and blogs aren't. An absence of newspapers and an absence of journalism look increasingly synonymous.

You do realize that many, if not most, newspapers are still available online, right? Those still employ journalists, if fewer of them.

@14, that's a memorable last line there. Hooboy.

@4 well, you know, like the Nelson Daily News ... oh wait, they just shut down ....

@7 ftw.

@15, most newspapers are available online, but that is a doomed model (at least as they currently operate). All online newspapers loose money; they are funded by their paper counterparts. If they ditched their paper versions, they could not survive long. The P-I is a good example. It is still an online newspaper, no longer in print form. But it's loosing money. How long do you think it will continue without a positive revenue stream?

@ Brendan, the LAT apparently missed this story for just as long. LOTS of newspapers have missed this. Why wasn't the LA Weekly looking into this?

@9, Bremerton may have commuters to Seattle, but it's not a "suburb". This is much more akin to Shoreline not having a paper than Bremerton.

True, 21.

So Brendan, why don't you guys start a great newspaper based in Bell and rake the muck in the seedy side of SoCal? Sounds like there's a crying need and now would be the time.

Extra Extra: Tod Smells!

@14 - Absolutely, but I can't believe that the actual medium employed (paper vs pixels) is the crux of the matter. It's just that we're living in a transitional period in the technology and business of journalism. The journalism itself is up to the journalists, as always. It's like when cars replaced horses—the roads really sucked for a while.

I appreciate your optimism, Anthony, but it seems to me more like we've paved the road and gotten rid of the horses, but those cars we were promised haven't shown up.

In theory, the medium isn't the crux. But in reality, the institutions of newspapers have the resources and habits of reporting, while the army of noble citizen-bloggers who were predicted to show up and replace (and even improve on) old-fashioned newspapers in protecting the public interest have not emerged.

The scrawny pixel-only joints aren't fulfilling their promise.

"The scrawny pixel-only joints aren't fulfilling their promise."

Brendan, neither are the newspapers.

@27: In general, I'd agree that the newspapers aren't completely doing their jobs, but it was still the LA Times that got there eventually. Considering the LA Times has a much bigger area to serve, and the town's blog is there only to serve the town, I think this is evidence that blogs haven't really brought journalism to the people. Instead they've brought punditry.

I think journalism could theoretically come from anywhere, but in practice, we haven't figured out how to have real journalism in blog form, and we only occasionally get real journalism in video form. This is an interesting time, and I hope that the investigative journalist doesn't become a relic of a forgotten age.

@26 - Agreed. I'm not arguing that unpaid bloggers can or will (or should) replace professional journalists, only that the business of journalism hasn't found a way to fund itself yet in the light of new technology. It's partially a failing of the industry's collective imagination and partially inevitable.

I just want more journalists to work on making a new workable model instead of lamenting the old one, which is already dead.

I would also argue that many of the pixel joints are fulfilling various parts of the promise, though they don't typically last long enough to become institutions (which need money). There are many counter-examples, but there are also (and there always have been) many shitty newspapers.