The apology is now online. Nexis, Factiva, pubmed and all the rest are amazing tools, but you have to use them. Sorry, let me rephrase that- you need to want to use them.

The overtaxed part isn't your fault--but where oh where is that journalists' union? The half-assed and lazy part is your (collective) fault. The total lack of introspection on the part of journalists is only typical for the age, I guess, but it's one of the major reasons that traditional journalism is dying an ugly death.

Instead of J-school grads trying to "save the world," they could start by trying to save their souls. And I mean that in a humanistic, not a religious sense.

Quality, not quantity, of journalists is the problem.

So when a newspaper takes its top assets (reporters who presumably are gathering the news) and reduces it, they are cutting into their advantage. The more they reduce themselves, the more they tend to rely on the "press release" story. And there, the blogs can be just as good.

I would suggest that they work on becoming a more trustworthy news source. The paper that can produce the most accurate, unslanted report on what is going on will have a huge advantage as the internet age unfolds.

Leaving foreign reporting to a handful of "biggies" means limiting perspectives to a handful of people. Some of the best foreign reporting I've seen has come from papers like The Hartford Courant. I already know how the NYT and WaPo will report an incident, how close to the facts they care to get. With one reporter responsible for a half-dozen or more reporters, there will be okay coverage of one or two countries, then a hash on everything else.

In my dealings with the reporters from the big papers and networks, it was always a matter of providing data to support the pre-conceived story. Those from small papers were usually a surprise.

Not all NYT or WaPo foreign correspondents are junk, just most of them.