Jim Lehrer discusses the Tribune Co.

First, I would have embedded the video for you here, but you can only digg or del.icio.us it (those aren't the only sites it supports, just the most common). So please go here to view it.

Okay, did you watch it?

Good, now we can talk about it. My favorite part is the disagreement between Jon Fine and Esther Thorson about the impact of the ever-shrinking newsroom. As Thorson rightly points out, those pages Fine said he wouldn't miss from his beloved New York Times weren't really there for him anyway. Those are the pages someone else is missing.

I have an example. This morning my boyfriend and I are having coffee over the paper, and he is digging through to see what sections are in today's edition. He squeals as he comes across "Entree" the weekly food-focused section. It usually includes one or two guest columns, a few recipes, an AP health story, etc.

I have never gotten excited about seeing it, and probably only read it once. As Thorson also mentions, there is one section neither one of us bypasses: City/Region. It's the only place to find out what's really going on here.

Fine says that newspapers should have been focusing on that all along. He also says he could go on the Internet and find 100 stories about what happened in Iraq today. Time to experiment...

Now I know that Google News is not one of the best aggregates so we'll check there and Yahoo! News as well. I am going to exclude any stories that are not about what actually happened during the war today.
Google News links: Associated Press story about soldiers who are in Iraq but want to help comrades in Afghanistan. That was the only story on the first page, which contained 30 articles with "Iraq" in the headline. Nothing on page two. Even the foreign newspapers were all about the U.S. presidential candidates and not about what's actually happening. Bear with me here, I think I'm going to make a point. There is one sentence in this world report from Reuters, published by England's The Guardian. That's on page four. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer today had an update on Iraq. That's on page five.

Okay, I don't feel like I've quite made my point yet so I'm headed over to Yahoo! to see what turns up. I'm impressed, second story is an AP story about total U.S. troop deaths in Iraq. Here is a CNN.com story about a car bombing that killed 15. It also has the AP story about soldiers wanting to be in Afghanistan and this story from Reuters about security. On the second page of hits is a story from AFP about taking control of Shiite provinces.

Okay, what did I learn?

I confirmed what everyone already knew, Google News isn't that good, and Yahoo! is better. It gave me way more variety of stories, rather than the same thing over and over again. We also learned from Yahoo! news that the only reporters in Iraq belong to the three biggest wire services in the world. Now I don't find this surprising or disappointing. At least we have someone there.

But do we have lots of these AP, Reuters, and AFP reporters telling us what's happening? Nope. As evidenced by the lack of variety in these stories, we don't have many reporters there. And I certainly didn't find Fine's suggested 100 stories about what happened in Iraq today. In fact I'm pretty sure I didn't even scrape the surface of what actually happened.

As an addendum I refer you to this article in the current issue of American Journalism Review