The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 5 of 12)

BR>Reuters or a reporter from one of the regionals (NYT, WaPo, MiaHld, AJC, LAT). Very little of the content is locally sourced. p>* Editorial section. Yes the local editor may have written a piece and does so daily. But if you look at the total column inches provided, most of that too is syndicated -- George Will, Molly Ivins, Pat Buchanan, etc. p>* B section is usually Metro and typically is local content for the smaller papers. But out of what is an 8-12 page section if you pull out all the ads column inches you end up with a section that is at best 2 pages of content. p>*C & D sections, usually contains classifieds and personal interest BR>items -- comic strips, Dear Abby, Neal Sperry, weather. Interestingly, nearly all of this content is syndicated. Even the classified section, backbone of the dailies, is being syndicated - Cars.com, Houses.com for example. p>The point? Syndication IS the paper now. It is distant, disconnected and lacking in the local content that is the source of your defense of MSM's continued existence. p> The Blog of Tomorrow BR>Some of your observations are valid. Especially the nearly circular cross references that occur on certain topics. Some are not however, your reference to bad archiving in some blogs lacks sincerity considering some papers today do not even maintain a morgue or archive of their papers at all. The best solution would be for Lexis-Nexis to permit Blogs to archive in that system just like MSM. But I think the bigger concern would be to your point Mr. Henry -- "How would the public get their news using a Blog?". p>First one must understand an enabling technology - RSS (Really Simple Syndication, natch). Details can be found here . Using this Internet tool, a provider can publish the XML content as a presentation or "feed" to other websites to pick up. The consumer of such a feed can fine-tune the presentation and desired content. This is how portal sites like Yahoo, Google and some online dailies operate, and how personalization to the end-user is accomplished. p>Let's assume Mr. Pleszczynski, editor of this fine online publication, was told to take it mainstream. How might he accomplish it? In the near term just like MSM does it today, syndication. Use AP and Reuters for National content, Take feeds from Townhall and -- gasp -- The Nation for editorial content. Bring in the syndicated Section C content for the personal interest items. One achieves relatively painlessly a facsimile of an online edition of any major daily today. The fly in this soup is that it depends on using MSM sources for content, and your argument of course is if those source were not there wither the Blogs?

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