Obama's press conference is national news. This article is arguing about the lack of local coverage.

The Huffington Post doesn't have the desire nor ability to chase up on some local police shooting, unless it really, really stands out as a potentially big, national story.

A local daily newspaper, with a staff of investigative journalists some of whom are dedicated to watching the police, does. None (or almost none) of those stories will make national headlines (and so they're not suitable for national papers), but they most certainly make a huge difference to local life.

Personally, I don't think the solution is to have newspapers watching the police. I think the solution is that all police officers at work should be permanently under watch via a justin.tv kind of system. Maybe with one day of delay (to prevent "the bad guys" from being able to tell that the police are on their way to their place), but no more. And this should most likely be administered by a third party with the power to have police officers docked if they refuse to hand over full recordings (so probably by a sub-department of the DoJ).

No, it's about recognizing that online-only organizations are worthy parts of the reporting infrastructure. Some day - and hopefully soon - Mayor Daley will call upon a reporter from the Chi-Town Daily News.

The HuffPo is fascinating - they provide an outlet for 9/11 truthers and their own paid reporters on the same platform. And the President of the United States recognizes such a brand as worthy of engagement. People run for local school boards for a reason - don't underestimate local citizen journalism just yet.

And cops already have cameras in their squad cars; many cities are already awash in CCTVs.

But there's something that David Simon says that's really interesting - he's fighting for a document. A paper document. That's the sort of stuff that EveryBlock and Public.Resource.org are fighting to free. And Carl's trying to get the GPO job: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498610

I dispute your notion that people are "called" to vocations. It's not that easy, never that easy. People may move in some directions more quickly than other people, but that doesn't make it some sort of preternatural thing. David Lynch is regarded as possibly the foremost filmmaker of this generation, but he started off as an artist, and he still paints in his free time, and in the meantime he's recorded music and written stories. So is "painter" his calling? Or is it "director", even though that's not what he's most interested in?

I'm biased reading any David Simon article because I use the context of The Wire as sort of an opening to Simon's points in any article. One of the big themes of The Wire was how people don't easily care about things immediately outside of their own frame of reference. That means that cops don't care about anything beyond cophood, politicians only care about relevant political issues, and so on.

The Huffington Post doesn't care about local news. They don't care about issues in Baltimore specifically. They care about big generic things, and as such they miss the point more often than not. They're a pretty poor source even for online reporting. Even the best ones, though, don't focus superlocally like actually local papers do.

Simon's argument isn't that newspapers are wonderful and magical, though. His argument is that newspapers also failed us, after they started chasing sensationalism and yellow journalism. His second point, made here, is that too few bloggers care about things like this. A local blogger doesn't have the instant influence that a journalist for a paper does. As a result, the local stuff gets even more ignored, beyond the basic cheap local news that everybody knows and nobody cares about. That's a major problem, and it's not one that's easily fixed.

If asking a question at an official press conference is considered sufficient evidence of a 'vigorous press', we're in trouble.