sances.info

“This story is far from over,” said Mr. Conroy on Tuesday. “There are 20 men in prison who are there on the basis of suspect confessions and no one is paying attention to them because investigative reporting is time-consuming and expensive and no one wants to pay for it. I’m not paying attention because I can’t afford to.

The study found 53 different sources of local news — general-interest newspapers like The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post and their Web sites, several smaller papers in the region, publications devoted to a niche like local business, local television and radio stations, and new online news sites and blogs. Even the reporting done by traditional media was driven mostly by government statements rather than journalists’ own digging, the study found.

The important work of being informed about public issues has been crowded out of our lives at the very time that big money has found a way to insinuate itself into nearly every cavity of government.

“My nightmare scenario is one of bankrupt newspapers, news by press release that is thinly disguised advocacy, scattered and ineffectual bands of former journalists and sincere amateurs whose work is left in obscurity, and a small cadre of high-priced newsletters that serve as an intelligence service for the rich and powerful,’’ Jones writes. In this dark world, he predicts, the wealthy grow more knowledgeable and powerful, the masses are left in a sort of cesspool “awash in opinion, spin and propaganda.’’

Who has the power to place an idea on the national agenda is another question that Mr. Benkler said Media Cloud could help answer. For instance, how is the conversation about the recession and the financial crash shaped? Using some of the database’s more specialized tools, Mr. Benkler investigated who first floated the idea for a temporary takeover of the financial system by the government, as was done in Sweden in the 1990s.

Or so the paper’s critics tend to think. Recently, in fact, “The Daily Show” dispatched a correspondent to The Times who returned with the amazing revelation that the front page of Friday morning’s paper is actually filled with Thursday’s news. The comic got the laugh but missed the larger point (not to mention the Web site). Journalism’s most important question is not today or yesterday — or even print or digital — but considerably deeper: With the blogosphere expanding like the freeways of Atlanta, are readers going to want a little guidance with their news? Or will they simply navigate the Internet alone?

One 12-nation study found Americans the least likely to discuss politics with people of different views, and this was particularly true of the well educated. High school dropouts had the most diverse group of discussion-mates, while college graduates managed to shelter themselves from uncomfortable perspectives.

The Internet overtook print newspapers as a news source this year, according to a report by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which asked more than a thousand people where they got “most of” their national and international news. (Respondents were allowed to name more than one medium.)

In the early months of the war, television images out of Iraq were abundant. “But clearly, viewers’ appetite for stories from Iraq waned when it turned from all-out battle into something equally important but more difficult to describe and cover,” Ms. Arraf said. She recalled hearing one of her TV editors say, “I don’t want to see the same old pictures of soldiers kicking down doors.”

Borrowing a taxonomy from a British neuroscientist, Rosen posits that “the time we spend in front of the computer and television is creating a two-class society: people of the screen and people of the book.” She continues, “The former, according to new neurological research, are exposing themselves to excessive amounts of dopamine, the natural chemical neurotransmitter produced by the brain. This in turn can lead to the suppression of activity in the prefrontal cortex, which controls functions such as measuring risk and considering the consequences of one’s actions.”