"Repetition, Commentary and Froth"

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last 8 years you already know that The Wire is probably the best show that TV has produced in the last 100 years.

Brilliant and bad-ass all at once, it's the sort of searing social commentary that could only be written by a dyed in the wool newsman with a chip on his shoulder.

David Simon is an American writer/author and TV producer who worked the city desk on the Baltimore Sun for 12 years. He wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets based on his experience as a police reporter.

His latest work Treme focuses on life in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and debuted in the US last Sunday. Dave is good police. Natural police.

Simon testified at a US Senate sub-committee hearing on the future of journalism on May 6th 2009 and his insight was both chilling and thought provoking. One short extract, then I'll shut up (mostly.)

"High-end journalism is dying in America and unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be re-born on the web or anywhere else.

The internet is a marvelous tool and clearly it is the informational delivery system of our future, but thus far it does not deliver much first generation reporting.

Instead it leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications, whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth.

Meanwhile, readers acquire news from the aggregators and abandon it's point of origin - namely the papers themselves. In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host."

Simon makes his point far more far more eloquently than I can, but the point is essentially one that I've been making offline for as long as papers have been giving their product away for free.

The internet is "a marvelous tool and clearly it is the informational delivery tool of our future." This much is true.

But as long as news organisations suffer while the likes of Google and others give their product away for free, the relationship is that of "parasite" and "host."

And, what far too many online advocates fail to realise is that the parasite needs the host in order to survive. It's simple biology. Once online journalism kicks the bucket, all we will be left with is commentary, froth and a lot of online porn.

You can read the full, unedited text of Simon's testimony here.