Steve Wasserman on the decline of the LA Times

This is off the topic of international politics and law, but in an earlier post discussing book reviews, I mentioned my old friend Steve Wasserman, the former editor of the LA Times book review and now the managing director of the NY office of Kneerim and Williams at Fish and Richardson, a literary agency. Steve gave me a call tonight - it was fabulous to be in touch again and catch up on many things - and mentioned this piece on the decline of the Los Angeles Times in the hands of the Chicago Tribune Company. It's a sad, sad story. The book review under Steve was an exciting place - but it could never survive under the current moronic suits, and Steve is doing well in his new position and well out of the LAT.
Among the many things Steve is right about in that article is his assessment of what print newspapers and reporters and editors and newsrooms are good for, and what blogs and all that are good for. Leaving aside certain publications that have simply migrated to the web while keeping their traditional journalistic structure intact, what web journalism is about is mostly opinion. Like this blog. Despite the increasing amount of information and data available raw on the web for research and investigation, there's still no substitute for shoe leather, interviews, investigation that cannot be done online. Citizen journalists sometimes produce genuinely new information, but 99% is comment on what someone else has done. There are big exceptions - the military blogs from Iraq and Afghanistan, for example - but most of the rest of us comment. It's the nonweb investigatory journalism that represents traditional media's competitive advantage - access, rolodex, the ability to get to sources that the rest of us can't get to. Yet so much MSM seems entranced by the idea of being pundits, migrating from the news pages to the op-ed page. The prestige seems to be there; some sense of working with ideas, not merely facts. Bad idea. It might better be thought of as trading in journalism for being merely a blogger. There's no competitive advantage there - indeed, journalists should not even assume that, being journalists, they even write so much better than other professionals who take to the web. The quality of writing in the serious blogs can be surprisingly high. The competitive advantage of professional journalists lies in what they can do with a serious block of time offline. It's what they can bring to the table that isn't already part of the (in some respects) curiously closed information circle of the web. Steve makes the point slightly differently, and better, than I do here, and the whole piece is really worth reading.