But it's the wrong question entirely. There's nothing at all relevant in the medium. Print isn't better because it's on paper, but because it has a business model that up until now has allowed for lots of journalists to get paid.

Can you name one website that financially supports 300 journalists? There are countless thousands of newspapers that do.

Sure, some of their work - regardless of what you think of it's quality, it was the best we had - can be replaced by volunteers, and some of it we won't miss in the least. But a sizeable amount we will. (It's not the quotes officials are happy to put out on blogs or otherwise that matter; it's those that are forced out of them).

The solution to this problem isn't going to come from going "pah, who needs them, they suck anyway amirite?", which is how your first post reads. It's going to come from admitting where online is weak, what is currently unique about print reporting, and working out the hell we can rescue those parts before we lose them entirely.

A free press is a hallmark of a democracy. We don't have an online one yet, just a bloated op-ed section. We need to get one, fast.

Let me rephrase, can you name a single subject, where the best source of information is an old school, mass media source ( ie, a source funded mainly by in print issues, distributed to a mass audience).

(It's not the quotes officials are happy to put out on blogs or otherwise that matter; it's those that are forced out of them).

That happens on blogs too. For instance, Techcrunch runs a nasty article calling out Google on some issue, and Google is forced to respond on its blog.

A free press is a hallmark of a democracy. We don't have an online one yet, just a bloated op-ed section. We need to get one, fast

Since we never had a good mass media, and never will, it is more realistic to discuss how to alter the structure of government, to make it less dependent on the whims of the masses.

Sure. Scottish politics. The best two sources of information on political life in Scotland are the country's two quality newspapers - The Scotsman and the Herald. (This isn't saying much: appropriately, they're both very, very poor shadows of their former selves). They are far and away better than the Scottish TV news, which mostly reports on their reporting or on events which are a matter of public record. Online coverage that isn't merely opinion or repurposing from the print stuff is incredibly scarce.

Without those papers -- and both are in fairly unhappy financial situations -- I'm not sure who is going to cover this stuff at all, in fact. The country already suffers from a deep deficit of investigative reporting: many of the local councils are virtual fiefdoms. And don't think it doesn't matter on a wider scale: The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and former Bank of Scotland (HBOS) both played key roles in bringing disaster down on the UK and global economies.

Since we never had a good mass media, and never will, it is more realistic to discuss how to alter the structure of government, to make it less dependent on the whims of the masses

I don't grant the premise: we may not have ever had a mass media that lived up to our ideals, but I'd say we certainly have one that attempted to: Watergate (the entrance of which is rapidly becoming the Godwining of dying-newspaper threads) is proof enough of that.

Ultimately, the role that journalism provides is accountability. It holds power to account. If you can come up with a structure of government that takes into account human nature and is one where the rulers don't need to be held to account by the governed and has a realistic implementation plan, I'll be amazed.

But I think it might be a whole lot easier to sort out how we do the accountability thing without print media. Even though I think that's going to be hard :)

I don't grant the premise: we may not have ever had a mass media that lived up to our ideals, but I'd say we certainly have one that attempted to: Watergate

Watergate wasn't investigative journalism, it was the Post being a conduit for leaks by the FBI: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20081222_death_deep_throat_an...

If you can come up with a structure of government that takes into account human nature and is one where the rulers don't need to be held to account by the governed and has a realistic implementation plan, I'll be amazed.

Here's one simple solution: Allow people to sell their votes.

A second solution: Competitive government. Delegate all policy (outside of defense) back to the states (or cities in the case of Scotland). Then instead of having citizens worry about policy, they can worry about results. The rulers will enact good policies not because they fear bad press, but because otherwise smart people will go live in other states.

Other solutions: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/formali...

or http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2007/05/juritopia.html

And of course, there is always good old fashioned monarchy. Have you ever read up on what the old European monarchies were actually like, in terms of taxes, economic growth, and personal freedom?

For one thing it's biased as all hell -- "Euroscepticism" is a particular right-wing British position -- and while there are many tedious arguments to be had about the impossibility of objectivity and how we're in a post-objective world and whatnot, it's surely not a bad thing to try and aim for. But far more importantly, the site's mainly comment/analysis, like we've been discussing. The majority of stuff I can see on the front page now is commentary riffing off from links to print media websites. It's good commentary if you like the beat they're thumping on their tub, but it's a million miles away from reporting.

Watergate wasn't investigative journalism

Ok, fine, Abu Ghraib. Broken by Seymour Hersh, based on a report that would otherwise never have seen the light of day. Or the majority of those on this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_Investigativ...

I'm going to let the Nu-Government thing slide, as it's not really germane to this. Suffice to say that I think all of these options (particularly the one that assumes people will find it easiest to uproot and move their families to express their opinions on their rulers) appear considerably more difficult to achieve than finding new and reliable sources of funding for investigative reporting.

Of course most of EU Referendum's articles are interpretation rather than raw reports from primary sources. But so are most Times articles. From the perspective of a reader with limited time, interpretation and summary is much more important than raw facts.

As for bias - sorry to bore you with my tedious arguments, but every source is biased. What matters is whether the source gives you an accurate view of reality. Or another way of putting it, a source of information is good if it leads you to not being surprised by future events, helps you make accurate predictions, and aids in making good decisions. I find European Referendum to be good on these accounts. On the other hand, I have found the NY Times to be a consistently crappy source of information ( the War in Iraq, financial crisis, and many others), and so I have mostly stopped reading it.

Ok, fine, Abu Ghraib. Broken by Seymour Hersh, based on a report that would otherwise never have seen the light of day.

What? Did Seymour Hersh secretly trail Pentagon officials and listen to their conversations until they revealed their dark secrets? No. The report was leaked by someone in the Pentagon who wanted the public to know about it. If Seymour Hersh hadn't been the lucky winner, the leaker could have distributed it to any number of people, including bloggers. Again, the press is not doing investigative journalism, it's being a conduit for leaks.

Suffice to say that I think all of these options appear considerably more difficult to achieve than finding new and reliable sources of funding for investigative reporting.

I actually have no doubt that journalism in its current form will continue. Foundations will fund the NYTimes if no one else does. And there is always the government funding route ... I just don't think that the current system of journalism, or the system of journalism in the 1970's, leads to good government.

(particularly the one that assumes people will find it easiest to uproot and move their families to express their opinions on their rulers)

Only a small fraction of families need to be mobile in order to properly incentivize the government to rule well.

I am probably missing one or two good sources but that should cover all the bases really.

Actually, it doesn't.

In the pollyanna world, readers might, based on what journalists found and printed. But in this one, journalists bootlick for access and reprint press releases.