EclecticLip

I’ve had a chance to interact with newspaper reporters for my theatre play, and can vouch that they’re nice people. Unfortunately, given their deadlines, they don’t have the time to do much research of their own. And sadly, they’re prone to getting basic facts wrong.

These symptoms are rife in newspaper commentary, the “fast food” of journalism, in which Thomas Friedman is the Whopper.
Long-form journalism (where reporters might spend weeks or months on a story) — the type in magazines like the Walrus, the Atlantic, or Harper’s — appears to be more accurate, in that the writer has the time to do their own research and provide a more informed perspective.

But I’d put specialized blogs at the top of the quality-of-information food-chain. If a community is especially nerdy geeky interested in a given topic, enough that some members compile their own research, that community will probably have a lot better insight than any professional reporter could obtain.
A couple recent articles brought this to the fore of my mind. First, off www.theoildrum.com, bar none the premiere website for peak oil discussion, this takedown of a dolefully ignorant article in the Telegraph:
Next, an interview of Nassim Nichols Taleb — whose book “The Black Swan” is this year’s equivalent of “The Tipping Point”. Some excerpts which reflect a similar mistrust of newspapers’ value:

[Taleb] reads for 60 hours a week, but almost never a newspaper, and he never watches television...

[life tip 8:] Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.