Big Journalism 2010

It's been a really bad week in the major media. Print journalism as a profession choked out its last gasping breath when the creator of Politico was named to the Pulitzer Prize board a couple of days ago. Presumably because they're such "innovators" in "new media." Not that they didn't start out with great promise and still do deliver some occassional real news coverage, but it's been long since they decided their winning business model would be pure Drudge baiting. At this point, they're no more credible overall than Fox.

But that was just building the funeral pyre. Today, they lit the match when Neilson bought out Editor & Publisher's owners and closed E&P. I can understand shutting down the print version, but not getting why they shuttered the online edition. It's one of the few sites that I still read regularly and trust for news. I didn't know until today that they had been printing for well over 100 years but not surprised. They treated the news with a respect for facts and ethics that harked back to the days when journalism was a profession, rather than just a business.

Meanwhile on your teevee:

This morning, Gore appeared on MSNBC, where Andrea Mitchell read from Sarah Palin's Facebook page to ask the former vice president questions about climate change.

And John Cole tells me that later today, they were reading Sarah's insipid Twitter feed on air. This is our major media going into the next decade. Not exactly screaming reliable news source in my ear.

And I hear that Andrew Breitbart is launching a boatload of "vertical sites" to his winger Big Gov site and they're all named Big something...

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]