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News as it happens should appear online, with the explicit caveat that it
is still largely undigested reports.

An example is yesterday morning's news of the Africa bombings.  It was in
the washpost.com and NYTimes.com before breakfast, but not in print until
18 hours later.  None of the first reports I saw tried to assign blame to
any party, a laudable restraint under the circumstances, as only a limited
number of groups exist who could/would commit such a crime.

Definitive pieces months later are also helpful, as they can include more
legitimate analysis based on differing perspectives, in order to provide
balance to the interpretation.  Unfortunately, this is not always the
pattern.

The objection increasingly focuses on the long advocasy opinion pieces
packaged as if it were balanced, in depth, journalistic interpretation.
These pieces cast little or no worthy light, but merely fan the emotional
contagion of smoke and flame, ...UNLESS they are clearly labeled up front
as opinion.

Surprisingly, so many journalists appear to be frustrated litigators,
trained to advocate a particular position, rather than dispassionately
inform.  It would be helpful if more journalists had advanced training in a
broader range of disciplines, including economics, business, the sciences,
and engineering.  Rather, in the past 20 years, young journalists, around
here especially, have so frequently been law grads attracted to journalism,
perhaps by the prospect of hobby-horsing personal convictions under the
guise of objective reporting.

Such pieces often lie by incompleteness, not by overtly stated active
falsehood; but worse, they are presented to readers as if the stories were
objective truth telling.  An example is the San Jose Merc's conspiracy
series debacle on the CIA selling crack in LA, ....which also appeared JUST
before the last national election.

Who here still thinks these ideological scare pieces are not part and
parcel of the silly season?  When writers begin acting like advocates in a
courtroom, or legislative lobbyists, they cease being journalists and
become proactive partisans.

Matt says....in part:

>Shaw's views on the subject can be found around word 4,800 in Part I:

>>>"Most journalists agree that the public is also served -- and often
served better -- by those reporters who worry more about being best than
about being first, who try to provide the definitive story rather than
the exclusive story, who take all the time necessary to produce
throughtful, comprehensive stories or series, even if they are not the
first -- or the second or third -- to report on a given subject."<<<

>Funny, most journalists I know "agree" that newspapers have something to do
>with covering news as it happens.

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