Jon Carroll pipes up

One of my favorite writers in the world, Jon Carroll of the SF Chronicle, wrote a contrarian view of the health of newspapers today. And one graf lower in the column highlights Loring Wirbel's comment from yesterday.

"Newspapers are the original aggregators; Web sites mostly just aggregate what the newspapers have already aggregated, plus opinion. Opinion is useful, sometimes funny, sometimes incisive, but it ain't no good without data. Newspapers are the fountainhead of data. We do the necessary job - well, not me, but real journalists. And we do it because we are trained to do it. We have, dare I say it, standards."

I think he makes a good point. The journalism business is changing. It's not the way it used to be, but it isn't going away anytime soon.