“Now … we see why ‘who’s a journalist?’ is so wrong-headed,” tweets Jay Rosen in response to the news. Clay Shirky chimes in: “Bloggers have no right to speech unless they’re part of the ‘official media establishment’? Ethiopia,Belarus &…Oregon.”

I can’t tell from those tweets if they read the actual ruling, but I did — and it actually doesn’t seem that bad. Rather than representing a luddite judge’s ignorant dismissal of a new medium, the ruling seems to lay the groundwork for a fairly expansive legal definition of journalism.

In the ruling, Judge Marco A. Hernandez upholds a defamation claim against blogger Crystal Cox, rejecting Cox’s seven defense arguments. The initial journosphere reactions have focused on Hernandez’s rejection of two of those arguments: that Cox shouldn’t have to reveal the source of this column because she is protected by Oregon’s media shield law; and that Cox should be protected from damages claims because she is “media.” In both cases, Hernandez rejects the arguments on the grounds that Cox is not “media.”

Hernandez’s rejection of Cox’s shield law defense seems to rest on a literal reading of Oregon’s shield law, which applies to people affiliated with a “newspaper, magazine or other periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system.”

Hernandez says, correctly, that Cox is not affiliated with any of the above; therefore she is not “media” according to Oregon’s law. It seems reasonable that the judge applied the law as written rather than expanding the interpretation of the law to include online media. If Oregon had updated its shield law to cover the Internet, as Washington state has done, perhaps Hernandez would have ruled differently.

But it’s Hernandez’s rejection of Cox’s second media defense that, to my mind, actually gives hope for future expanded legal definitions of “media” and “journalist”:

Defendant fails to bring forth any evidence suggestive of her status as a journalist. For example, there is no evidence of (1) any education in journalism; (2) any credentials or proof of any affiliation with any recognized news entity; (3) proof of adherence to journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking, or disclosures of conflicts of interest; (4) keeping notes of conversations and interviews conducted; (5) mutual understanding or agreement of confidentiality between the defendant and his/her sources; (6) creation of an independent product rather than assembling writings and postings of others; or (7) contacting “the other side” to get both sides of a story.

If Hernandez believed that you need to have a Columbia J-school degree or work at the New York Times to be considered a journalist, he would have stopped at No. 2. But he doesn’t stop there — instead, he offers five additional criteria that could define someone as a journalist. These criteria aren’t based on a credential or business card — or a particular medium — but on practices, values, and standards.

By doing this, the ruling smartly avoids saying “bloggers aren’t journalists.” It merely says “this blogger is not a journalist.” By listing criteria 3-7 and avoiding any mention of specific media, Hernandez is basically saying: “Bloggers may be journalists — but to be considered as such, they have to do something that could fit a standards/practices-based, medium-agnostic definition of journalism.”

It’s easy to quibble with Hernandez’s choice of canonized practices and standards (I can see some in the journosphere taking issue with No. 6 in particular) or say his criteria aren’t expansive enough. But to the extent that “journalist” and “media” need to be defined in the law, Hernandez’s approach seems like the right one. And his criteria seem as hopeful a starting point* as any.

—–

* Note: I’m not up to speed on other definition-of-journalist case law. I’m sure there have been other rulings that offer their own criteria for such definitions.

Figuring out how to better serve local businesses and connect those businesses to readers is a big part of local news organizations’ hopes and ideas for making money online.

Facebook’s Deals platform, announced in November, was a blow to these hopes. Now Groupon has piled on with its Groupon Stores platform.

Here’s what Groupon Stores offers:

Businesses can now create and launch their own deals whenever they want. Think of it as the online equivalent of a merchant’s physical storefront. Merchants can now:

• Setup a permanent (and free!) e-commerce presence on Groupon for promoting their business.
• Create their own offers to run deals whenever they want.
• Submit deals to be promoted to Groupon subscribers through email and the Deal Feed (explained below).
• Get customers to follow their Groupon Store, and stay in touch by sending messages through the daily email and deal feed.

Groupon takes a 10 percent cut of deals sold through this platform without its promotional help, and a 30 percent cut of such deals that it promotes. (Groupon takes a 50 percent cut of its bread-and-butter deals-of-the-day.)

Facebook Deals, meanwhile, is free.

What can a news organization offer a local business to top these platforms? It’s not like businesses will be lacking an audience through the platforms, since the entire universe uses Facebook and a growing number of desireable-demographic folks use Groupon.

If Groupon adds aggregation of restaurant reviews, Better Business Bureau rankings, and the like, it’ll have local-business content that equals or is better than that of most news orgs.

No wonder Google is willing to spend $6 billion to get in on that.

We have war criminals as president and vice-president, and a constitution staggering after one serious terror attack. But the campaign is about whether Obama is like Paris Hilton.

The threat of Rove and his ilk is not that their petty, deceptive and irresistibly subjective tactics are evil in a petty, deceptive, childish kind of way. It’s that their venial sins distract from their mortal ones. It’s the mortal ones we have to be worried about. And the mortal ones that they are getting away with.

And from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

The housing market is collapsing, Iran is pursuing the bomb, climate change is peeking over the horizon–and we are discussing power-bars and Honest Tea. Look, all campaigns do their share of unfair attacks. And at the end of the day, it’s Obama’s job to come back with a devastating counter. He’s excelled at that all year. I expect him to do no less here. But–and I this will sound totally syrupy and naive–I really thought John McCain was a little better than this.

Jonathan Chait explains the political side of this state of affairs in his latest New Republic column:

In the late 1980s, the popular revolt against government that had bubbled up in the mid-’60s began to peter out, sapping the power of straightforward anti-government appeals. And, starting in 1992, Democrats ruthlessly purged nearly all their political liabilities by embracing anti-crime measures, welfare reform, and middle-class tax cuts, and, more recently, by abandoning gun control. What’s left is a political terrain generally favorable to Democrats, which has, in turn, forced Republicans to emphasize the personal virtue of their nominees.

And so, every four years, we have a Democratic candidate campaigning on health care, the minimum wage, education, Medicare, or Social Security, and a Republican candidate campaigning on themes like Trust, Courage, and so forth.

Why journalists play along with this game is another matter.

UPDATE: Michael Grunwald pushed back against this nonsense in a good Time column Monday, and Obama himself had a pretty good rejoinder at a town hall meeting (hat tip: The Plank):

Gahran identifies a number of attitudes that “directly cut off options [for change] from consideration” and can lead to a “toxic” newsroom culture. She also articulates what, to my mind, is turning out to be the central problem with objectivity-era mainstream journalism:

Journalists (more so than most other professions) are supposed to be fundamentally curious and profoundly interested in what’s happening around them.

An apparent lack of curiosity shows up in today’s newspapers in the form of ignorant political journalism, stories written straight from press releases and PR pitches, stories that treat technology and consumer electronics as alien subjects. It shows up inside newsrooms in the form of old-timers who still aren’t comfortable with computers, new-timers who’ve heard of RSS but haven’t tried it out, higher-ups who rarely read journalism/new media blogs.

Institutional strictures are probably the main culprit here. Why bother being well-versed in policy if objectivity conventions forbid you from betraying your expertise in print? Why bother learning how to use new technology if the paper is (until recently) making boatloads of cash doing things the way they’ve always been done? Why explore things like RSS if nobody in the newsroom has articulated why you should do so?

Still, just as newspapers as institutions will have to change, individual journalists will have to ask themselves if they’re curious and interested enough to pro-actively face the coming shakeout. Because in three to five years, it’s likely that the only people to still have journalism jobs will be those who view journalism as more than just that job they’ve always had.

There’s been a ton of response to the debate around the blogosphere. Andrew Sullivan has roundups here and here, and a good post of his own. James Fallows weighs in from China with an important post that includes an excerpt from his 1996 article, “Why Americans Hate the Media”:

When ordinary citizens have a chance to pose questions to political leaders, they rarely ask about the game of politics. They want to know how the reality of politics will affect them—through taxes, programs, scholarship funds, wars. Journalists justify their intrusiveness and excesses by claiming that they are the public’s representatives, asking the questions their fellow citizens would ask if they had the privilege of meeting with Presidents and senators. In fact they ask questions that only their fellow political professionals care about.

In the same vein, anyone interested in this topic should read Matthew Yglesias’ December Washington Monthly piece on how NBC’s Tim Russert is the driving force behind this kind of political coverage.

The one good thing about the debate is that it was such a monumental debacle — even Tom Shales, the Washington Post’s TV critic, called it “shoddy” and “despicable,” — that the backlash might finally be strong enough to keep this conversation going and (one can dream) eventually spark some changes.

Furthermore, the near-total focus on these sorts of things to the exclusion of policy shows the general shallowness of newspaper political journalism, especially campaign journalism. There are many reasons for this, starting with objectivity conventions, which give reporters little reason to read white papers, policy proposals, scholarly books, etc. Whereas writers for New Republic, Atlantic, Slate et. al. are a) not bound by “objectivity” strictures and b) well-versed in policy.

Sure, there are some campaign moments that do give insight into a candidate’s policy considerations or say something genuinely noteworthy about their personality. Hillary Clinton’s attacks on Obama that perfectly dovetail with Republican attacks betray her willingness to put personal ambition ahead of the party. Obama’s devotion to progressive policy goals looks suspect when he attacks Clinton’s health care proposal via mailers that follow the same script as Republican mailers that played a major role in defeating the Clintons’ ’90s health-care reform. John McCain’s ignorance about any any number of issues portends a certain kind of detached presidency.

But for the most part, the nature of political coverage in newspapers, mainstream newsmagazines, and TV news makes the whole discussion about “media bias” in the context of the Democratic race essentially meaningless.

Anyway, since I’ll probably never get around to writing that full post, I wanted to point out two must-read pieces that do a great job of puncturing the bubble in which this political coverage takes place.

First, Ezra Klein gets at the essential silliness of the “controversy” over Obama’s recent remarks on why working-class voters might not vote for him or Democrats — remarks that, while poorly phrased, were squarely in the mainstream of Democratic discussion:

But let’s be clear: It’s not damaging because we think it foretells him doing something harmful to the country. It’s not damaging because it suggests his policy agenda is poorly conceived, or his priorities are awry. If you think of policy and politics as two circles in a Venn diagram, this is damage that only exists in the politics circle, and doesn’t even come close to the area of intersection. We reporters have to cover it, of course, because it’s Really Important, and matters more than the housing plans of all the candidates put together. But it matters in a completely self-referential way, it matters only because it matters, not because it means anything about Obama, or illuminates anything about his potential presidency. It’s a hollow scandal. …

I love the Venn diagram image. It perfectly captures why these sorts of flareups are pointless. No wonder so many people tune out politics and political news.

The second great piece is a Slate essay by Troy Patterson about the dismal state of political satire and how it reflects the shallowness of mainstream political coverage. Patterson quotes University of Iowa professor Russell L. Peterson’s new book, Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into a Joke, to describe how late-night jokes

“rarely transcend the level of pure ad hominem mockery.” They’re personality jokes and, as such, of a piece with character-based journalistic narratives that “treat newsmakers not as the subjects of newscasts but as the news’ cast.”

Patterson also nicely calls out Saturday Night Live on its satire-free political satire:

Rumors of SNL’s rebirth have been greatly exaggerated. … SNL has twice devoted sketches to the idea that debate moderators, as members of an Obama-besotted media, have given the Illinois senator an easy go of it in his one-on-one debates with Hillary Clinton. But the only jokes were in the impersonations (Amy Poehler’s schoolmarm nodding as Hillary, Fred Armisen’s catching Obama’s professor-preacher cadence) and in the hyperbole (CNN’s Soledad O’Brien so hot and bothered that she fans herself). The joke never develops beyond its premise. We all already know that the media is in the tank for Obama because we read it in the papers. SNL might have tried to turn these sketches into jokes about why this is the case — Is it about race? Celebrity? The hunger for a new narrative? — or it could have wondered about the relationship between this adoration and Obama’s oft-reported aloofness from reporters. It did not.

Likewise, Tina Fey’s editorial in support of Hillary as a guest on “Weekend Update” was not a political statement. She might have cut at the press or at Obama. What she did, instead, was to identify herself and her candidates as “bitches.” I can’t dispute Fey’s point that “bitches get stuff done,” but I will argue that the entire joke falls apart without the frisson of that word — a shock tactic that Sarah Silverman must have outgrown before her first period.

This is why the the stories saying “OMG SNL is totally sticking it to the media for sucking up to Obama!!!” were so annoying. Policy-ignorant, image-obsessed political reporters were praising a policy-ignorant, image-obsessed satirical show for calling them out on — what exactly? Focusing on one candidate’s image over the other’s? Not ignoring both candidates’ policy positions enough? Spending too much time on one candidate’s meaningless campaign minutiae? Talk about the blind (and unfunny) leading the blind (and even less funny).

It all pretty much makes my brain hurt.

For the vast majority of people, a Friday night at the movies is just that — and nothing more. Most people really don’t care about and have no use for lengthy dissertations about the ways in which Steven Soderbergh borrows from Godard. They just want to know whether to see Ocean’s 12! Playing blame the audience doesn’t work for music studios trying to combat piracy, and it doesn’t work for cranky critics who remain convinced they deserve $2 a word for 1) their insights into obscure movies few people want to see or 2) their complaints about Big Dumb Movies that everyone’s going to see anyway.

I would add that a majority of criticism doesn’t even rise to this level of sophistication/pretension. When I led a session on criticism at the Poynter Institute’s High School Writers Workshop, I presented the difference between good and bad criticism as the difference between a term paper (an original thesis supported by examples from the text) and a book report (basic plot summary with maybe a cursory judgment). Many print reviews still tend toward the book report end of the criticism spectrum. (Plus more papers are experimenting with things like American Idol live-blogs and other “insta-criticism” that runs more toward summary/quick response but is totally appropriate for the subjects and form.)

Suderman makes an even more important point about the lack of perspective from those in the newspaper industry who mourn the loss of print critics. He writes:

Trenchant criticism hasn’t died; it’s just shifted venues. …

Meanwhile, I simply refuse to buy the argument that the loss of book pages and film-review jobs is a bad thing. Yes, it’s a bad thing for professional critics. Yes, it’s tougher for those lucky few thousand folks to make a living reading books and watching movies! On the other hand, the internet has actually created vastly more opportunity for aspiring critics to get their work read. The barriers to entry in top-end publications are still high, but those outlets are no longer the only options for critics on the make. So we’ll see fewer professional critics, sure, but we’ll also see far, far more criticism.

And yes, some of it will be bad. But on the whole, I’d guess that it will create a net gain in serious, thought-provoking criticism of just about every medium. Meanwhile, most of those truly elite outlets — the New Yorkers and the Washington Posts — are not going away.

Terrific points all. Jody Rosen is the best music critic in the country; he writes for Slate, not a newspaper. Newspapers that have a Jody Rosen should build an online brand and community around that critic and hope the critic doesn’t leave. If they don’t have a Jody Rosen, if their critics file one book-report review after another — and if newspapers increasingly need to think about what they can offer readers that no one else can — then they should treat every kind of critic as a luxury except for (maybe) local-music and (definitely) restaurant critics.

But there’s one crucial piece missing from Suderman’s analysis. Yes, there’s plenty of great criticism online. Yes, there’s going to be a net increase in great criticism thanks to that online crit-boom. But like so much of the online news-commentary-criticism boom, it is invisible to newspaper readers.

Suderman assumes that getting rid of critics won’t matter because newspaper readers will find the good stuff online. That would be true if you assume everyone has an RSS feed and reads Slate, Pitchfork, and House Next Door. Needless to say, not everyone does. If they did, that would further erode newspapers’ declining readership.

So if newspapers do get rid of in-house critics, they need to simultaneously start giving readers some of the material Suderman talks about. That goes for more than just criticism. Newspapers can no longer treat the online universe as invisible. They have to find a way to bring that great content to their readers, both via the Web and in print.

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: Journalism is under fire right now, much more so than just about any other industry in America. More than a thousand jobs have already been cut this year from mainstream media organizations and thousands more will be in the coming months. It’s a very dark hour for journalism.

Tell that to the auto, mortgage/housing/banking, and manufacturing industries. As I pointed out in this post,

Ford lost $2.7 billion in 2007 and $12.6 billion the year before — and those aren’t just losses in market capitalization (that was probably a heck of a lot more), but $15 billion in actual money down the drain. Think they wouldn’t kill for that 21 percent margin [Gannett's 2007 margin]? (Their 2007 margin: minus-6.8 percent.)

The mortgage industry lost 14,000 jobs in the first three months of the year. Subprime mortgage losses have cost insurers $38 billion so far. Banks, brokers, and insurers could end up writing down $285 billion in subprime losses (writedowns have already reached $150 billion).

Dell just closed a Texas plant, costing 900 people their jobs (of the at least 8,800 people the company plans to fire, some will surely be in the United States). Motorola has laid off 10,000 people in the past year (though again, not sure how much of the total is American workers). In the U.S. manufacturing sector overall, 67,000 people were laid off in February.

Yes, these industries are all much bigger than the news media. But let’s keep a sense of perspective here. As Chris Anderson notes, the newspaper industry is “a $45 billion business, which is twice as big as Google and Yahoo combined.” Times are tough, but the apocalypse is still a ways off. Operating with a clear-eyed view of the situation, rather than panicking and overstating newspapers’ very real problems, is the best chance we have at keeping the end times at bay.

(All that being said, I actually agree with much of Thornton’s advice for would-be journalists.)

But I have two big issues with Twitter so far, or more like one and a half maybe. One is a general criticism, and one is specific to journalism. The latter issue suggests that while the kind of information-delivery that Twitter represents will be increasingly important to newspapers and journalism, Twitter itself might not be the best way for newspapers to harness this new info-delivery mindset.

The general problem is that URLs count toward the 140-character limit for each Twitter post. Jeff Jarvis asked recently: “Are we losing a wealth of link knowledge on Twitter because it’s all going through TinyURL and other services that truncate addresses so they’ll fit?” It’s a good question. On a less global-Web scale, it’s annoying not knowing where someone’s Twitter links are sending you. There’s often not enough space for a Twitterer to indicate who they’re linking to, and readers can’t mouse over the link to find out (because it’s just a tinyurl or the like).

An easy workaround would be to make URLs invisible to the character count. This wouldn’t result in extra-long, strange-character-filled Twitters because the posts already automatically truncate long URLs with an ellipsis. And it would resolve both my petty annoyance and Jarvis’s worry about Twitter links not counting toward the Web’s internal knowledge.

The bigger issue is that Twitter’s 140-character maximum is an arbitrary cutoff that may limit the program’s (system? tool? what is Twitter?) usefulness for journalists.

I asked in a recent Twitter post whether it’s a breach of protocol to continue a thought in a second post. To me, that violates the spirit of the 140-character limit. But if you can’t do that, Twitter is somewhat useless to newspapers. Try getting a full quote into a single Twitter post; unless your source is unusually pithy, it’s very hard. Now try covering a City Council meeting or other event without including a single quote. It seems that following the 140-character limit would result in much more impressionistic news coverage.

If it is okay to continue a thought in multiple subsequent posts — well, why bother having a character limit at all?

Maybe impressionistic, real-time, multiply authored news coverage is okay. Daniel Victor gave a wonderful example of Twitter-as-news-coverage a couple weeks ago, when truckers staged a protest in Harrisburg. Here’s a portion of a Twitter thread from that day:

bydanielvictor: Trucks blaring horns on 2nd Street in protest of gas prices. Normally I’d be amused but they woke me up. Was looking fwd to sleeping in. (9:32 a.m.)

bydanielvictor: Thought it was a Three Mile Island alarm or some other apocalypse notification system. (9:32 a.m.)

gotwalt: Hundreds of tractor trailers driving by the office honking their horns to protest gas prices. It’s like a hangover simulator. (9:34 a.m.)

Victor contrasted the Twitter coverage with a newspaper’s, concluding that “this experience on Twitter shows how the supposed immediacy of blogging just won’t be immediate enough as more people find their way to services like Twitter.”

It was a great example of Twitter at work, but does it really point to the future of news coverage? What if you want to know more about why the truckers are striking? Are their claims fair, can the state legislators do anything about it, etc.? On the other hand, the paper probably went into these details in a preview story, or could do a follow-up. I guess if truckers are blaring through your city, at that moment you’re probably less interested in policy details and more about the immediate details an impressionistic Twitter feed could tell you.

Even if those immediate details are what readers want, the 140-character limit could make things unwieldy once many more people are using Twitter. As I commented on Victor’s post:

One of my general worries about getting wrapped up in Twitter is that it could be a massive time-suck going through hundreds or thousands of postlets. What if that happened on a small scale with news stories?

Would coverage of, say, a presidential debate or inauguration, or a political rally, or a county fair, be overwhelming if you had to sort through 150 different Twitter feeds or posts on it? Granted, 150 snippets of different points of view could be more interesting, but simply the logistics of getting your news that way could get tiring, it seems.

So I’m back to the arbitrariness of that 140-character max. Ultimately I’m not sure why multiple 140-character Twitter posts are better than a simple live-blog. Or better than multiple non-truncated Twitter posts. Particularly for events or stories that involve people talking (which is most stories), the Twitter model won’t work as well as a live-blog that actually has space for quotes.

It’s not an either/or situation. Twitter could work fine for certain kinds of stories. Even for events involving people speaking, sometimes quotes don’t matter; at an iPod unveiling, for example, I don’t always care about Steve Jobs’s PR-crafted pitches. And newspapers certainly should be internalizing and implementing the kind of news delivery Twitter represents: real-time, partly reader-generated, link-friendly.

But while the 140-character limit largely defines Twitter, it might be too arbitrarily strict for wholesale newspaper adoption.

After the season’s first episode aired, Simon responded to Slate’s TV Club discussion of the show by saying: “The Wire’s depiction of the multitude of problems facing newspapers and high-end journalism will either stand or fall on what happens on screen, not on the back-hallway debate over the past histories, opinions passions or peculiarities of those who create it.” Well, he’s had his on-screen say. And all it did was nearly ruin one of the best shows on TV and prove that David Simon has either no clue or simply nothing interesting to say about the very real, very serious problems facing newspapers in 2008.

Earlier in the season, I wrote of Season 5′s Baltimore Sun storyline: “So far his ‘multitude of problems’ are a) Too many Stephen Glasses, b) Pompous idiot editors too dim to see the clearly telegraphed Stephen Glasses and disinterested in getting at the root of social problems, and at a distant third c) Corporate cost-cutting. That is all.” Six episodes later, that’s still The Wire’s diagnosis. And one moment from the finale crystallizes both the storyline’s unreality and Simon’s apparent cluelessness.

In the closing montage, we see plagiarist Scott Templeton on stage at Columbia University receiving a Pulitzer Prize along with his two evil editors. This plot development is absurd because, as Ann Friedman writes at the American Prospect,

it seemed completely unrealistic that, presented with the evidence, the higher-ups at the paper would turn their heads and ignore Templeton’s plagiarism. Their defense of Templeton made sense up until this last episode — until Gus presumably laid out all the evidence. But even with a Pulitzer on the line, I find it pretty unbelievable that they would just let it all stand.

And because, as David Plotz writes at Slate:

No editor would willfully ignore evidence of a reporter manufacturing stories the way The Wire‘s Sun editors do. It would never be worth it. The New York Times and Washington Post would trade any number of Pulitzers to wipe the stains of Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke from their histories.

And because, as Andrew Johnston writes at The House Next Door, the show’s Pulitzer moment means that

every single person we’ve met who’s on Gus’ side and who has doubts about Templeton—including the Metro, Regional Affairs and State editors, who are all at least Gus’ equal on the masthead and some of whom may be above him on the food chain—every single one of them is a wuss who’s so scared of losing his or her job that they’re willing to let Gus take the fall.

For a show that’s supposedly so realistic, this is plain bad storytelling. But as an indictment of modern newspapers, it’s even worse — because it shows just how little Simon grasps the implications of the Internet.

In the real world of 2008, Templeton simply could not have gotten away with his lies — let alone won a Pulitzer. Plotz writes at Slate, “As we’ve seen this week with the pair of faked memoirs, fabulists get caught.” If the Sun plot were taking place in a real-life newsroom today and evil editors ignored a city editor’s warnings about a possible plagiarist in their ranks, he wouldn’t just take his lumps and demotion to the copy desk in silence. He would e-mail Romenesko, or Jack Shafer (who has just written two columns flagging instances of a reporter’s plagiarism), or Howard Kurtz, or the Pulitzer committee (who would surely take any warnings seriously after the Janet Cooke fiasco). To take a recent real-life example, a week and a half ago blogger Nancy Nall Derringer discovered a White House official had plagiarized a Dartmouth Review essay in a column for an Indiana paper. The official resigned within 12 hours — after the post got picked up on other blogs and other sleuths discovered more plagiarism.

But just as Simon doesn’t seem to grasp that the Internet is the root of newspapers’ non-fictional problems, he doesn’t grasp that the Internet also would have prevented his plagiarist from getting away with it for so long. This is newspapers’ challenge in a nutshell: the Internet has broken their monopoly on distribution, so anyone can be a journalist now and bring down a White House plagiarist, and readers don’t need the physical paper to get the news. This may be bad for newspapers, but it’s great for journalism. More people than ever are reading smart, important journalism because of the Internet, and more shoddy journalism and plagiarism is flagged — even as the Web makes it harder for newspapers to survive in the form they’ve taken for decades.

None of this has anything to do with the newspaper industry depicted in The Wire.

Now, Simon of course argues that the newsroom story does have a deeper point. In a long interview with the Star-Ledger’s Alan Sepinwall, Simon says:

The main theme is not the fabulist and what he is perpetrating. That’s the overt plot. The main theme is that, with the exception of the bookends — at the beginning, the excellent effort at adversarial journalism that begins the piece in episode one and the genuine piece of narrative journalism that concludes it, with Bubbles — it’s a newspaper that is so eviscerated, so worn, so devoid of veterans, so consumed by the wrong things, and so denied the ability to replenish itself that it singularly misses every single story in the season.

If that’s the case — if the gutting of a paper is truly the focus — why does the Templeton story take up 90 percent of the Sun plot while the big missed stories — the deaths of Prop Joe and Omar — are 10-second mentions that only close watchers or recap-readers would catch? Simon also cites Clay Davis’ prosecution as an overlooked story, which fair enough; that’s explicitly presented as a case where staffing cuts led them to miss the story. But Davis has presumably been in office for years — plenty of time for a previously non-gutted newsroom to have done some investigative reporting on the state senator. If the reporters in the fictional equivalent of Simon’s day had done the kind of reporting he implies was done back in the real-life day, even an eventually short-staffed newsroom would have found a way to keep an eye on the biggest political crook in the state (wait, I forgot — the fictional Sun only has five reporters).

In the Star-Ledger interview, Simon goes on to dig himself a deeper hole:

What I’m loving, it makes me warm all over, is that a lot of the obsession of journalists in the evaluating … (isn’t that theme) but whether Whiting is as big an a–hole as Valchek, “Is Gus more of a hero than Colvin?,” “Do they have to put suspenders on that guy?,” “I can’t believe any editor would say that,” “Why would Alma drive all the way over there?” I’m loving it. It’s this onanistic, self-obsessed world of journalism — which is the problem.

Right, that’s definitely journalism’s biggest problem these days: onanistic, self-obsessed navel-gazers like David Simon. To the extent that people have noted some of these minor things, it’s because they are the details that betray Simon’s failure. The fictional editors do speak in journalistic cliches. Alma would have just checked the Sun’s Web site — or logged into the Sun’s computer system at home — instead of driving to the plant to see how her story got played. Again, for a show obsessed with realism, these are tellingly unrealistic details. Simon is ignoring the many extensive, smart critiques of his journalism plotline, just as he’s ignoring the many relevant critiques of real journalism.

Simon gives one brief nod to the Internet in the interview:

This was a story about a newspaper that now — on some fundamental basis — fails to cover its city substantively, and guess what — between out-of-town ownership, carpetbagging editors, the emphasis on impact journalism or Prize-culture journalism and, of course, the economic preamble that is the arrival of the internet and the resulting loss of revenue and staff, there are a f–k of a lot of newspapers that are failing to cover their cities substantively.

Never mind that the Internet, to my recollection, is mentioned exactly zero times on the show. It’s also worth repeating that his model for the show’s “carpetbagging editors” are the universally (except by David Simon) respected John Carroll and Bill Marimow.

One last point: It’s fashionable these days to bash journalism awards, though Simon certainly goes further than most in blaming prize-grubbing for newspapers’ problems. But have a look at some recent Pulitzer winners. In 2007, the Wall Street Journal won for “its creative and comprehensive probe into backdated stock options for business executives that triggered investigations, the ouster of top officials and widespread change in corporate America.” The Birmingham News of Alabama won for exposing “cronyism and corruption in the state’s two-year college system, resulting in the dismissal of the chancellor and other corrective action.” The Boston Globe won for “revelations that President Bush often used ‘signing statements’ to assert his controversial right to bypass provisions of new laws.” In 2006, the Washington Post won for its investigations “of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff that exposed congressional corruption and produced reform efforts” and for its “persistent, painstaking reports on secret ‘black site’ prisons and other controversial features of the government’s counterterrorism campaign.” The New York Times won for its “carefully sourced stories on secret domestic eavesdropping that stirred a national debate on the boundary line between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberty.” The New Orleans Times-Picayune and Sun Herald of Mississippi won for their coverage of Hurricane Katrina. This year, the Washington Post is sure to win for its exposes of Walter Reed Medical Center’s shameful treatment of wounded veterans.

Do these sound like empty “prize-culture” stories to you? They don’t to me. They damn sure are “impact journalism,” though I’m not sure why that’s a pejorative in David Simon’s eyes. Would he be happier if the Post hadn’t written the Abramoff and black sites stories for fear of prize grubbing? If the Times-Picayune hadn’t risked its journalists’ sanity by serving as a lifeline to readers and simply continuing to function after Katrina? If veterans were still routinely housed in mildew-filled rooms because Anne Hull and Dana Priest didn’t write their stories? Yes, plenty of deserving stories don’t win awards. Yes, some less-than-earth-shattering feature stories have probably won Pulitzers. Yes, some resources are probably wasted on occasional journalistic equivalents of movie Oscar moments. But for Simon to imply that Templeton’s plagiarized homeless fluff could actually fly amid these winning entries today is an insult to the many great journalists who aren’t backing down in the face of the industry’s problems.

I’m the last person to peddle false journalism nostalgia. These great Pulitzer winners aren’t going to save newspapers. But I, like many others, am actually trying to do something about it. So to the long list of the industry’s real problems, I would add: supposed champions of journalism who use once-in-a-lifetime cultural megaphones to bitch about 15-year-old personal grudges.