THINGS TO COME

Much as I love my laptop, I'm still an old media type who enjoys shuffling dead trees at the breakfast table. But, yes, it does already feel like the equivalent of quill-sharpening.

More thoughts on the future of the press in an intriguing TCS column by Nathan Smith, pegged to the NY Times' decision to charge for access. Smith represents the new breed of media consumer. ("I haven't read print newspapers regularly in years. I've read plenty of content from newspapers online, but I usually link to it through blogs or internet portals, and half the time I don't even notice which newspaper I'm reading.") As he peeps over the horizon, he sees old traditions  - and  old mores - dissolving:

A historian I read, inclined to admire him, reported that "Talleyrand had convictions; he simply preferred to be paid for acting on them." This will be a fitting motto for a different kind of journalist. What I have in mind is not a corrupt hack who will write whatever someone who pays him wants to write. No, the journalist of the tradition of Talleyrand will know and write just what he believes. But he will figure whose self-interest is served by his articles being available to the public, be it George Soros or General Electric or trial lawyers or the Ford Foundation or the People's Republic of China, and persuade them to pay him for it.

The rest of us will have to get a bit less snobbish about journalistic independence, but we'll also rely on citizen-bloggers to filter these writers, to rely on them selectively, to applaud them when they're providing good information and good arguments, and to expose them when they pull a fast one.

UPDATE: Roger L. Simon muses on the meaning of Pajamas.