Done With Mirrors

This is the primiere entry last fall for a weblog of the above name, in which a small-town reporter reflects on his own place in the media machine, and how it has exploded in recent years -- particularly with the medium that you are reading now:

In the 1960s, with only three network channels and international print coverage in America driven almost entirely by the AP, UPI, and the New York Times, the worldview of the majority of Americans could be shaped by a few twitches in the top newsrooms.

Now, you get the Internet. You get Fox News. You get NPR. You get Radio America. Hell, you can all but duplicate my copy desk job of sorting through the AP wire and the AP photo desk; it's all online. I'm waiting for the day my boss figures out that all this material, for which we pay tens of thousands of dollars per year as a "member" of the Associated Press, is available for free to anyone with a laptop and a phone jack.

But that's the rub. Most people don't have four hours a day to sort through the AP, Reuters, AFP wires and photo desks. They'll pay 50 cents for a newspaper, or sit through 10 minutes of dull TV commercials, for the sake of letting someone do it for them.

And so it goes.