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The "delivery" of your news

Stephen Brook, press correspondent for The Guardian, reports:

"Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, tonight issued a stark warning that the supply of reliable news reporting is dwindling despite the internet-driven worldwide information explosion.

Delivering this year's Hugo Young memorial lecture to an audience at Chatham House in London, Keller said that the gravest danger to the future of newspapers was not political pressure, nor the "acid rain" of criticism from the blogosphere or new technology upending the business model.

"It is a loss of faith, a failure of resolve on the part of the people who make newspapers."

Keller said bloggers, internet search engines and satirical talk shows had blossomed across the world but could never replace reporting.

"That may sound like a strange thing to say in the age of too much information."

He referred to a "media tsunami" of blogs, Google News, RSS feeds, social networking websites like MySpace and online video file-sharing operations such as YouTube.

"The civic labour performed by journalists on the ground cannot be replicated by legions of bloggers sitting hunched over their computer screens," Keller said.

"It cannot be replaced by a search engine. It cannot be supplanted by shouting heads or satirical television shows. What is absent from the vast array of new media outlets is, first and foremost, the great engine of news-gathering - the people who witness events, ferret out information, supply context and explanation."

Read the full piece here. Meanwhile, contemplate this quite bizarre "reporting" by the US State Department on conditions in Iraq - being a plagiarised compilation of news-clips from various newspapers:

"Kind of pathetic when the official report from the US State Department on what's "really" happening in Iraq is actually just a bunch of plagiarized paragraphs from the major media in the US. To wit, the following analysis an anonymous friend just sent me. I just checked it out and he's right. State outright plagiarized much of the major media in making its "report." And what's really funny, they even stole a number of paragraphs from a New York Times article when, as I recall, the NYT is the newspaper that George Bush refuses to read because it supposedly has such a "liberal bias."

Yes, true, as the full piece on AMERICAblog.com clearly shows.

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