This sounds so much like the printing industry of 10 or 12 years ago, when desktop publishing began to take hold. Printing companies and color sep houses who thought that thier professionalism would save them are no longer here or are doing business on a much smaller scale. And they were somewhat arrogant about it too. Give people the tools and they'll do it themselves.

Maybe we could use the internet to force the "Big Media" to find out WHY John Kerry refuses to release his "full military record," as the DNC lap dogs demanded of Bush?

Let's see everything in print about the "hero's" record: Officer Performance Reports, incident reports, medical exams, psych (?) exams...everything. He's hiding something, so why doesn't Big Media seize on this like they seized on GW's ANG service?

Objection, your Honor: print on paper is one hell of a lot superior to staring endlessly at a screen to read the same amount of text. Plus in print on paper, you can jump right over the items which are trivia to an individual reader - while on screen, you have to stare at each one to see if you want to read it or not.

What the print boys and girls need to do is QUIT OMITTING the stuff that works against their biases. At minimum that mandates some real diversity in the newsroom, or whatever substitutes for it. PARTICULARLY in taxpayer-supported media like PBS and NPR: their news elites are uniformly slanted left, the taxpayers are nearly balanced.

To use an old Vietnam example, the US media was all over the My Lai deaths and portrayed them as typical US behavior (as did our Democratic wonder boy JFKerry) - while the far greater massacres of civilians by the Communists were blithely omitted from coverage. Readers were not to be given any basis to conclude the US actions were not the height of evil.

Anyone have an update on Stephen VanDyke's HOW NEWS TRAVELS ON THE INTERNET visual analysis at http://stephenvandyke.com/2004/03/08how-news-travels-on-the-internet/ cuz it may be too complicted for a journalist? My task is to see how far we can go with the updates to the world's oldest political metaphor; Aesop's Fable, Belly and the Members."

Insufficiently Sensitive: I increasingly prefer to read on-screen and lack the patience of reading on paper.

I also don't understand why you think I can't skip over items that don't interest me on-screen, since I do it every day, every hour, nearly every minute that I read online.

I am also increasingly impatient with print sources that make an assertion, but don't give me an easy way to cross-reference their claims, or related materials (like with a hyperlink).

I'm with Bill. I think paper and ink journalism needs to go the way of the steamship. It's not needed. Although it would be nice to have cheap and effective readers. E-Book technology still hasn't caught on for that, but it should sooner or later.

Readers were not to be given any basis to conclude the US actions were not the height of evil.

Of course, they would never do that today.

Very little news happens in a newsroom.

Well ... there's more to it than that. Newsrooms can be very, very good or very, very bad. I've worked in both. In a good newsroom, you work at a much higher capacity. You get smarter ... whereas in a bad newsroom, you're either on your own, you get dumber, or you struggle against the tide.

Blogs do provide a useful service, though. They open up the public debate to voices that have been ignored. News reporters have a remarkable lack of diversity of opinion. Blogging has opened up and exposed newsreporters to a lot that they were missing.

"And they ought to abandon the traditional "newsroom" located usually in an expensive building located on pricey downtown real estate..."

Yes! Outsource to the rest of America and the world! It is inevitable and welcome!

Not long ago, the editor and the publisher of The Washington Post were on Charlie Rose promoting a book on the news business.

One subject that came up, briefly, was the impact of the online revolution on their industry. Though both men were in their fifties, they might as well have been a generation older. Neither had the slightest glimmer of a notion why news consumers might choose the Internet. Neither had even a vague intimation of what the future might hold. They were shockingly clueless.

My memory was a bit off. Charlie Rose interviewed executive editor Leonard Downie and associate editor Robert Kaiser of The Washington Post for their book The News About the News.

They seemed to have no conception whatsoever concerning the impact of the Internet. It was like hearing two top scientists pontificating about these newfangled thingies called transistors.