Quality work is still pretty self evident, the cream will continue to rise to the top…even more so than when getting a writing job meant going to a prestigious journalism school & impressing the right people in power. Yes there is a lot of BS on AP, but that’s relegated to the Fanposts/Fanshots…you see even worse on the KC Star’s comments section. The great thing about the ‘new media’ is that the barriers to entry for talented writers are no longer nearly as important.

I mean think about it, there are many Chiefs blogs out there, but only the highest quality ones (like AP & Bob Gretz) probably receive any significant traffic.

It used to be (in that mythical rose tinted world) that proper journalists researched and dug up stories and their editor would say what is your source, I can’t go to print without a source.

That’s the ideal…the objective reporter always writes an objective story from a verifiable source. But it’s not the reality and never was. The reality is that the news was usually slanted, the reporters were always biased and taking liberties with the sourcing was frequent. Until Reagan put the kibosh on the Fairness Doctrine, the primary reason that we considered newspapers and major networks to be “high-quality” reporting and analysis was that there was simply little else to compare them to because other voices were frozen out of the debate. That’s why liberals are so high on the idea of “net neutrality” and reimplementing the “Fairness” Doctrine. They liked the era of lazy journalism with a liberal bias coming from what was essentially a government-created monopoly. Now those reporters have to bust their asses against the rest of the world and they’re finding out that the reality is that much of what they do just isn’t that difficult, that even the average person is capable of doing good analysis without having a journalist as a filter, and that real news reporting isn’t the sole province of the “professional”.