“Often recounted, like the tales of Agincourt, with advantages, they present the reporter as a roguish knight-errant, a dashing adventurer with a streak of rat-like cunning. The stuff of countless Fleet Street memoirs, they are also the essence of the Watergate story and of newsroom dramas such as “The Front Pageâ€. Today, however, such derring-do is rare, not just because telephones and live television make it unnecessary to rely on steamships and trains, but because the whole idea of news as a commodity owned and purveyed by journalists is slipping into history.”
So writes Brian Cathcart in More Intelligent Life, Winter 2009 issue. “If news, as a commodity purveyed by reporters, is coming to an end, when and how did it start?”
