I went to Barnes Noble the other day and bought a copy of Gun by C. J. Chivers.

I could have waited to buy it used, or borrowed a copy, but I felt it was important to buy one because I want Chivers to get some money from me for his efforts.

Chivers book is good a history of the Kalashnikov Rifle but why I admire his work, and want him to prosper from it, is more because of his work as a reporter for the New York Times.

Chivers is the Times battlefield correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan. His reporting is brilliant. There no other word for it. He works with the troops, takes fire with the troops, and reports amazingly afterwards.

If one story summarizes his work it is this one (click!) in which he covers the aftermath of a sniper incident in which a soldier was shot in the head. The story is all about the medic who worked on the soldier.

Brilliant doesn describe it. than Ernie Pyle comes close. When people ask me what good journalism is like, I show them this story.

But the Times can pay Chivers to do this kind of work if we don buy the Times paper. That why I subscribe. Not just because when I read the paper I always find something Iwouldn have if I read it on line. Not just because I an old fart who likes a printed page.

But because the Times is a system, an infrastructure, that provides us information that we wouldn get otherwise, that bloggers can duplicate, that media don do. Chivers work could be run on the Internet only, but then it would be one of a hundred million or so web site that nobody would see. Yeah, sure, maybe it would go viral, but what are the odds?

In the Times printed paper, millions see it today. Not thousands.

The Times ispart of a larger infrastructure of newspapers and paid news gatherers around this country that is rapidly going away as advertisers dry up, free web sites take newspapers news andsiphon off our customers, and reporters positions disappear. One of the Las Vegas papers has hired a company to chase after news accumulation web sites and force them to pay, and I think all newspapers, including mine, ought to be doing that.

Chivers isn a blogger. He a reporter who does a hell of a job. He deserves to be paid. If you read his stuff, you should pay him. Unless you areOK with the people who buy what yourproduces not paying your boss. How long would Larry Miller stay in business if nobody paid to watch movies in his theaters orpaid for the cars they driveoff his lots?

And, no, you can borrow my book. Go buy one.

And when the Times goes to paid access to their web site, sign up and pay. Better yet, subscribe now. I guarantee, not a day won go by you don find something in the paper worth the cost.

And, no, nobody at the Times paid me to write this, but if they ever make it possible for me to tell Chivers how much I admire his work, I take it.

Charlie, instead of presenting this as an either or choice (free or paid, print or internet), I wish you would acknowledge that all of these types of media have their niche and that each of them does something that the others can or won City Weekly covers stories that are too controversial for the Trib. Should I refuse to read it just because it free?

Nate Silver out did the traditional media in analyzing objective data about politics, and he now been assimilated into the Times web site no registration required to read his blog there.

And of course, if you want to understand Ogden City politics, you need to read Weber County Forum because your newspaper is afraid to tell the truth about Godfrey.

The old system where the traditional media had a monopoly on deciding what news was not always a good thing. It allowed them to sell us the Iraq war, among other atrocities. I glad we now have more diversity of sources for national news, and I look forward to the day when your newspaper will no longer have the power to decide what is and isn news here in Ogden.

dan, not ALL media us the Iraq war fact, most media I paid attention to, were trying to educate the public about what was going on as much as they could, with the available information. Bravo to them!

Unfortunately, since then, the right wing has demonized The New York Times while their reporter, Judith Miller, was one of the strongest proponents of the war.

The right wants to demonize the Times, Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame while they still contend that the Saddam Hussein had WMDs, thanks to their pet girl, NYT Judith Miller.

If you look closely at Salt Lake City weekly, you find that many of their staff are journalists. Not all, but many. Their articles are (mostly) better written and sourced than many alt weeklies.

Then again, it was a blogger in Vancouver WA who wasthe first person to publicly state in print, that Bethany Storro acid attack story matched her initials.

But they all piggy backers. Neither the Salt Lake City Weekly or bloggers would have anything to write about UNLESS they piggybacked onto stories initially reported in the press. They can all operate outside journalism, while the legitimate press does have to protect sources (even when they don want to).

You wrote: the Salt Lake City Weekly or bloggers would have anything to write about UNLESS they piggybacked onto stories initially reported in the press. That not true, I think, of the City Weekly, which does a great deal more than simply piggy back on stories initially reported by main stream Air Jordan 12s media. SLW does, IMHO, at the moment the best investigative reporting in all of N. Utah. And there are blogs run by professional journalists which break news with some regularity.

You more right about blogs that aggregate MSM news and then comment. I read for example WCF daily, and have been known to post a thing or two on it. But as I keep reminding folks there who bash the SE regularly, a great deal t of Jordan 8 Retro what appears on WCF, and what people comment on there, are stories that first appeared in the SE. it was Dan, not the SE, who used the public records law to unearth the Godfrey administration emails discussing how important it was not to let the Council know that the Administration was laundering payments for a gondola study through UTA. why the city provided at no cost a city owned Air Jordan 2011 venue for a political fund raiser the money from which went to support administration backed Council candidates and even to assist the Mayor’s re election campaign].

Still, on the whole, Charlie is right: newspapers matter. A lot. And people who think they matter ought to be willing to pay for them and their content. Otherwise they will die. Many have already. And no, I am not sanguine about how a nation with few or no newspapers will fare relying exclusively on alternative media instead.

Besides, there another advantage to paying. Occasionally, when I criticized the SE in its comment columns or on WCF, someone asks me [generally unhappily] who the hell I KOBE 9 am to criticize professional journalists, what credentials I have Air Jordan 8 to presume to criticize the paper and its editors. I get to tel them this: have the best possible credentials to be a critic of the paper. I a subscriber.