It seems you can’t spend five min­utes on the Inter­net with­out com­ing across an opin­ion piece on the end of tra­di­tional media or an arti­cle riff­ing on the age of the blog. I’ve so far refrained from not­ing (m)any of these arti­cles, mainly because the argu­ment is becom­ing stale and the arti­cles are so widespread.

Michael Mass­ing’s lat­est for The New York Review of Books is one worth your time, how­ever: it’s a bal­anced, detailed view on the new land­scape of report­ing—that of a sym­bio­sis between blogs, online media out­lets, and tra­di­tional national and inter­na­tional news­pa­pers. (It also serves as a good resource to some of the best blogs around.)

This, in response to David Simon (he of Bal­ti­more Sun and The Wire fame) liken­ing the Inter­net to a par­a­site “slowly killing the host”:

This image of the Inter­net as par­a­site has some foun­da­tion. With­out the vital news-gathering per­formed by estab­lished insti­tu­tions, many Web sites would sput­ter and die. In their sweep and scorn, how­ever, such state­ments seem as out­dated as they are defen­sive. Over the past few months alone, a remark­able amount of orig­i­nal, excit­ing, and cre­ative (if also chaotic and mad­den­ing) mate­r­ial has appeared on the Inter­net. The prac­tice of jour­nal­ism, far from being leeched by the Web, is being rein­vented there, with a vari­ety of fas­ci­nat­ing exper­i­ments in the gath­er­ing, pre­sen­ta­tion, and deliv­ery of news.