Let me first associate myself with Matt Yglesias’s remarks here:

The trouble is that when journalists talk about journalism, they talk about it from the producer point of view. What Google does, from the media-as-production point of view, really isn’t much better than what the paper boy does. But from the consumer point of view, having a paper boy who will fetch any paper you want in the world, for free, at any time, and open the paper to the page you were looking for, is a massive improvement.

This points to what’s going to happen to those newspapers, like the New York Times, that have any hope of surviving. You hear people worrying about how few papers still have foreign bureaus, and wondering what will happen when the Times and the few other papers that maintain a lot of foreign desks are forced to shutter them. In fact, it’s very hard to justify keeping them open—from a financial perspective, of course, but from a journalistic perspective as well.

The Times’s London bureau has maybe a half-dozen reporters covering everything that happens in Britain. When there’s an important story they cover it; when there isn’t they write features on random topics. What service are the bureau’s employees providing for the Times’s readers?

Let’s say you were designing the New York Times from scratch. Would you begin from the assumption that all the reporting on matters British should be done by paid employees of the New York Times Company? Or would you arrange for a Times editor in New York to pore over the many fine British newspapers, extract the most relevant content, and present it to readers? Has the London bureau produced any significant scoops in the past decade? What about Paris or Sydney or any other bureau in a place that’s well-served by local media?

The Times’s Baghdad bureau is doing heroic and irreplaceable work. The Times’s London bureau, on the other hand, is duplicating some small fraction of the labor done by perfectly competent British journalists.

October 11, 2009 ▮ media