On newspapers in America

So, it appears no paper wants to run a piece unless it has "a local angle". Everything else is just grabbed off the wire.

That's some fine reporting there, America.

It's odd being here, watching the collapse of traditional media.

Newspapers are continually downsizing, and relying more on freelancers, when not copying and pasting Reuters/AP. The popular image of a buzzing newsroom is exactly that. We're standing here watching sudden massive decentralisation of news reporting. Cellphone cameras are rapidly encroaching on traditional photojournalism. The Internet seems to have caught most of news corporations completely unaware, even though people have been warning them for years (see here for a reason why. Admittedly that's for music, but the mindset is identical).

On the other hand, writing on the Internet is massively precarious in its own right. It's full of hucksters and con artists, startup companies destined to go bust. Dozens of sites looking for authors, and paying in "experience". Great, maybe I'll level up, and gain +3 to typing or something.

There's a scene in Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan in which Spider and his filthy assistants are going to do some digging for a story. He talks about how, when people say research, they mean reading through old press releases. God, I swear, every time I re-read Transmet I'm more and more convinced Warren Ellis is actually from the future and knows exactly what's fucking happening.

Part of me doesn't want to embrace the future (for all the fun it looks to be). Part of me thinks there would be nothing better than being in a newsroom, keyboards rapidly clacking, bad coffee everywhere, deadlines looming, and an editor shouting "I need pictures! Pictures of Spider-man!" Interviews, research, investigative journalism. That sort of thing.

Instead, we've now been gifted with print media that's so rapidly losing money that it runs stories about pop stars because it costs almost no money and requires no real writing. Why pay a staff member to research and write on real news, when you can bung together an article about someone's latest meltdown in 20 minutes and call it a day?

And where the hell are you meant to write on the Internet? Most sites have the credibility of a flyer handed out on street corners by the one eyed guy with no hair. Political extremes, rampant misogyny, 9/11 conspiracy nuts. They're all there. The only places actually worth getting your name attached to are harder to get into than a Nun's panties, or else are have a traditional print side anyway.

Hell, it's impossible to get a position at even a crappy local paper.

I wonder about other countries. New Zealand has the same problem that it has in many fields, too many grads for too few jobs. I really can't imagine there being enough journalism positions to satisfy the yearly graduate output from excellent student rags and crappy journalism 'techs. Hell, how hard fought over are the internships at the Listener?

Anybody know what it's like in the rest of the world? Australia/Canada/UK? Because they're totally the only ones that count.