Your comment makes it sound like gawker is some kind of lightweight, nimble organization that provides all the hard news that say the NYT or the Washington Post do but at a fraction of the cost. Gawker is a tabloid. While there are some entertaining stories it in no way replaces a more serious news organization.
I don't mean to be overly critical. I just think that society needs the kind of information that the large papers provide. They definitely are having trouble coming up with a new viable business model, but it doesn't seem prudent to dismiss them by holding up gawker as a model to emulate.
My point is simply that there are plenty of room for news it's just that the news organizations most probably need to focus much more as they can't maintain the overhead of covering more and more at the pace news are moving today.
It's not a natural law that newspapers have to cover both local, domestic and international news. This did make sense when the news industry was very different, but insisting that reality somehow seem to conform to their needs is in my opinion absurd (I am not saying you said that)
In my opinion news are fundamentally gossip, until it's verified, written up and if it's found important analyzed further.
The access to the actual news (plane went down in Hudson) is almost ever present which means that you don't have to staff up around the world just to be sure to catch what is going on.
There are so many areas that newspapers still seem to insist on keeping that it makes it impossible for them to get lean enough to make proper profit. And let's not forget that so many much smaller news sites are eating into their profit.
I like you enjoy well written articles, geopolitics and in depth analysis, but we are not the norm.
To most people what is going on around the corner is more important than what's going on in Iraq or Philadelphia.
That doesn't mean there isn't room for serious journalism. Just that it has to change it's scope.
I don't mean to be overly critical. I just think that society needs the kind of information that the large papers provide. They definitely are having trouble coming up with a new viable business model, but it doesn't seem prudent to dismiss them by holding up gawker as a model to emulate.