Most people who don't work in the news business have no idea where the stories they read/hear/see come from... Perhaps you assume the stories come from a wire service, like the Associated Press. OK, but where does the AP get its stories? The answer, mostly, is from newspapers.
That's bad news, because newspapers are dying, and many are on life support... The internet is largely responsible for the dead-tree demise, and how's that for irony? Once the papers go, news sites and blogs around the world are going to have to come up with another way to get content, because on the media food chain, newspapers feed all of us... There would be no Drudge Report without newspapers. No NBC Nightly News. No Paul Harvey. No "Life On The Beach".
If newspapers cease to provide news content, it's possible that broadcast journalism could make a comeback, although I'm not holding my breath. TV and Radio news outlets have become dependent on ripping and reading stories that other companies have paid to produce, and a business model based on actually producing news does not jibe with the bottom line. This kind of thinking is what left me "on the beach" to begin with.
This article from Variety does a great job of explaining how the news business works, and I highly recommend you read it. After all - who knows how much longer Variety will be around?
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