Why the mainstream media is dying

The problem to me is that most media outlets are still populated with J-school grads when they should be housed with experts.

That's why blogs are winning, because you can go straight to these people with laser focused insights that you just can't get from a j-school grad. In the past, journalists would have to go to experts for comments and structure stories around that, now with blogs you get to cut out the middle man.

A lot of the good reporting I saw over the last year has come from experts. Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight was able to generate some really great analysis on election polls.

The crew at CalculatedRisk gave reported on the mortgage industry and financial crisis better than most mainstream outlets. Actually, Tanta over there used to have to regularly correct Gretchen Morgenson, one of the senior writers at the NYT.

With war reporting, Andrew Exum at AbuMuqawama was really really great on issues dealing with the Surge/Afghanistan/Iraq. I have to bet that one of the reasons is because he served as a ranger in Afghanistan and Iraq and then got a masters in COIN and a PhD studying Hezb.

These were instances outside of Tech where I saw some really good reporting. I think Tech media will always be ahead of everyone just based on the savviness of their consumers. You can really see that with the absolute embracing of video podcast programs by the tech crowd whereas in finance we still havent seen anything close to that for taking out trash like CNBC.

Does anything in Arrington's background make him better suited to cover technology than a journalism graduate?

Eventually, each of them has the chance to make himself into an expert in his field. The journalism grad might also remember some stuff from her studies such as not to invest in companies operating in the field she covers, verify with several sources, try to get responses before publishing and so on.

I'd say that blogs are a huge disappointment exactly because they failed to fulfill the promise of reporting by those who know most. Instead we got reporting by the those who write most, which tend to be the Scobles and Arringtons of this world rather than the Cunninghams and Torvalds (Torvaldi? ;).

I think Fake Steve is among the sharpest commentator on this space, but he's completely wrong here, suggesting TC > NYT because something they threw out against the wall managed to stay stuck.

I agree with that sentiment, but beware of directly comparing age. Blogging will likely rise and fall faster than newspapers.

The mainstream media is certainly not dying; the newspapers, and the television, however are.

People forget that a newspaper, or a magazine, or a television station aren't news sources; they're distribution systems.

Every day, I wake up and read things from: The Times Online, New Scientist, Scientific American, Wired, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, The Financial Times, and probably more.

The paradigm might be changing shape, but it isn't going to be that different. Websites like this one become new-stands, and the distribution changes (from papers and trucks to packets and routers), but that is about it.

This misses the elephant in the room: the majority of the Times article probably written by a PR firm, not by anyone employed at NYT. I've met several journalists that say it pretty bluntly - the only place to make a decent salary for a good journalist is in PR houses and think tanks.