Years ago I subscribed to a number of magazines. As time went by the ratio of material to advertisements kept getting smaller and smaller. All the time the price of the magazine kept going up. When they reached the point of being mostly ads with an article chopped into five or six pieces scattered throughout, I quit subscribing.

That speaks for magazines, but I think a certain saturation point has been reached everywhere and technology has made it easier to skip past the advertising.

You should try again, BB2. They're selling subscriptions to all the best magazines for dirt cheap now, to keep their circulation numbers up, and the ads are less obnoxious. I've gotten Harper's and The Atlantic for way less than a dollar an issue, and The New Yorker is even giving me righteous deals. There is still some very fine reading to be gotten in there, and you can kick back, get out of the blare of the pixels, and really get lost in some good stuff.

Good riddance to bad trash.

Sigh.

Look, when ANY form of reporting gets big enough, they think they ARE the news - that they can make the news, manipulating reality. This is nothing new - we went to friggin WAR over 100 years ago because Hearst thought it would sell more newspapers.

They thought they could sell big lies forever. Thank the deity of your choice they were dead wrong.

Real journalism isn't when everybody says the same thing, it's when a real debate happens, it's when smaller players thrash out the facts. It happens out of both an exchange of information and an ongoing debate, more like academia than the corporate horsecrap we've been dealing with.

Big media won't go away completely, but they also won't ever have the sort of monopoly they're used to, ever again.

Good.

I think I could survive with bradblog, buzzflash, greg palast, media matters, and marc crispin miller. Maybe RawStory, but maybe not.

HuffPost? I could take it or leave it. DailyKOS? Please no!
Truthout? Not so much.

The New York Times? What, I need Judith Miller, Eric Schmitt, Andy Worthington or all the other government stenographers? I need "journalism" that spikes stories that could change history because they might "impact an election?" NO. I don't need that, I don't respect that, and I surely won't PAY for that, or support that model.

The Nation? Yeah, they do a lot of good, and Seymour Hersh is great, but boy, where were they on Electoral Integrity in 2000, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006 or 2008?

Is traditional journalism dead? If that's the craft that supports the run up to the Iraq War, refuses to talk about the stories that matter, and frames everything within the "corporate state and capitalism is good but needs a little tweaking" frame, then it's BETTER OFF DEAD and I'll be happy to drive the final nail in the coffin sooner rather than later.

Oh, I forgot to mention Elisabeth Bumiller --- she should have her "journalism" credentials revoked and be required to do J-school over again. That, or simply make her flip bugers for the next ten or twenty years. What a total tool for the neocons and incapable of the least amount of independent investigation on ANYTHING.

For her to be allowed to use the First Ammendment in any way cheapens our entire Constitution.