NP: Steven Wilson, Insurgentes

There's a tangential argument to be made in my rant last week about the relentless real-time experience of the blogosphere, and that's the idea that the "regular" media have let us down to the point that we're more or less stuck with the fast, fickle world of blogs to see any real opinion.

An element of this percolates through David Simon's comments on what I have to say was an excellent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher last week, which is that newspapers made the Faustian bargain to offer a watered-down product in order to maximize profits, and there's also a hint of it in a recent Howard Kurtz column about how the papers missed their chance to be more like blogs back when no one knew what blogs were.

So, anyway, after all that setup, I just wanted to offer up some evidence that the mainstream media still has at least some mojo, by way of a very well-reasoned piece by Dan Balz at the Washington Post on Obama's governing style and decisions through the first four months of his presidency, as well as a pretty decent, non-ideological defense of Obama's reversals on the specific issues of detainee photos and military tribunals on the same paper's editorial page that same day.

Which goes back to Simon's point, I think. Quality has value, and people will (presumably) pay at least something for value. But having devalued their product so severely, now it's going to be a hard sell to get anyone to pony up. Again, this has strong parallels to the music business, in that CD prices stayed high while the perception of one or two good songs amidst a lot of filler became more pervasive.