It’s fine for people to discuss the news and voice their opinions. That’s great.

The AP’s main purpose, though, is not voicing opinions. It’s about gathering reporting facts. Reporters are paid to investigate, interview, compile information and tell what happened, hopefully without injecting their opinions. That costs money. Newspapers and local TV newsrooms are being hurt by declining advertising support in the new reality of a china-mart retail world, and many local radio news operations are already gone. (the only news I hear on our local stations is some guy reading the local paper, without the bylines)

If a new business model for gathering and reporting news doesn’t gain traction soon, accurate and reliable reporting will become a thing of the past. The public’s watchdog will die. And then there will be a lot more to talk about, but you won’t know if it’s really true.

But then, some people find the concept of anarchy to be a desirable thing.

When was the freedom of the press, freedom of speech and the public’s right to know overturned?

I thought the Berlin Wall along with the Iron Curtain fell years ago,….can you say censorship comrade?

No one “OWNS” the freaking news. Hello???

Thanks for saying in at least a slightly better way what I was merely ranting about yesterday. I will be most pleased to steal your ideas and expose them over at our blog, hopefully later today.

By the way, I’m a burned out obsolete IT type. Started out with ear protection and iso-propyl alcohol serving a room full of 500+ Kilobytes of XDS Sigma 5 and got as far as Multics and PL/I (humble application maintenance, alas) before petering out. One slightly amusing but ultimately futile off-budget effort was demonstrating that you could build a pretty interesting one-way function for authentication purposes with Rubik’s Cube. Here’s a hint how I did it (much of that content’s mine–yours for the browsing).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoradic

I have spent the first going-on 3 years of post-retirement jumping up and down like a demented hamster warning the web about the evils of SFAS 140 abuse in the context of America’s quasi-private mortgage finance. As it turned out, that was mildly important, but if Singleton had had his way back in mid-’06 it would have snuffed that effort pretty effectively, and I wouldn’t have been around to throw vegetables at Jim Lockhart’s ridiculous “effective guarantee” of agencies, etc. Think that’s the real point? (obviously not me, but the hoard of people like me examining every move of the powers-that-be, not to mention the occasional outlier like my colleagues Aaron Krowne & the late Doris Dungey who *do* make a difference).

Anyway, here I go stealing this bit of content from ZDNet’s Larry Dignan. I think he’s got a good point to add to the present topic.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=15877
“I’m not going to sweat AP’s search for rules of engagement for one simple reason (Techmeme, AP statement [links in original, of course]): I link to the real source material, which more often than not is a press release. On any given day you can easily bypass AP. And if the AP wants to find a better subscriber business model it needs to adhere to two words: Add value. Is AP trying to protect its “industry’s content” or PR Newswire’s?”