In a survey of the state of the newspaper business for American Journalism Review, Paul Fahri writes:

Reporting is a labor-intensive enterprise . . .

Particularly labor-intensive are investigative and enterprise reporting, which dig beneath the surface and often turn up the stories that are most valuable for readers.

The question is, if newspapers, online or on paper, don’t provide the resources to report on their communities in depth, who will?

So far, the answer appears to be almost no one.

What about bloggers, you ask?

Bloggers — one of the Internet’s most important info-innovations — don’t offer much hope. Bloggers mainly chew over facts that others have collected — in essence repeating, not reporting. In a survey of the 100 most popular news-related blogs in 2004 — 59 responded — University of South Carolina doctoral students Bryan Murley and Kim Smith found half the bloggers said they got most of their news and information from newspapers. Another 19 percent got most of their information from other bloggers, who in turn were likely to have gotten it from a newspaper or some other mainstream outlet.

2004?

A lot has happened since 2004. A lot.

This guy is writing about blogging without taking 10 minutes on Google to fact-check his aaa. . . ssertion. Someone really ought to show him the door to the other universe.