For eons now, I’ve been struggling with a question that some of you have been confronting, too: is the Web a rich enough source of information and entertainment that I can get rid of cable TV service? So far, I haven’t cut the cable, and I keep saying that one big reason why is the usefulness of continuous TV news coverage of really big stories. But stories don’t get much bigger than yesterday’s discovery and killing of Osama Bin Laden. And the TV coverage I saw didn’t make a great case for cable being indispensable.
In the time before President Obama made his address, I mostly watched NBC News and CNN. Nobody who wasn’t involved in the operation knew much about it at this point, so the anchors on these channels mostly tapdanced to fill time. They told us, over and over again, that this was huge news. (Really?) But they didn’t even ask many of the questions I was asking–such as “how about al-Zawahiri?”–let alone attempt to answer them. The screen was full of talking heads, but they were saying very little.
With its background in search, it should not be a surprise that 
The New York Times is reporting on a new survey that says that 48 percent of Americans would be willing to pay something for online news. The Times’ story begins with a tsk-tsking tone: We Yanks are less likely to say we’d pony up than people in other western countries. But a lover of ambitious news reporting–and, I hasten to add, someone with a selfish desire to see the media business continue to provide paying work–I found the figure sort of encouraging. In a world in which everybody except Wall Street Journal readers get to be happy online freeloaders, I would have guessed that considerably less than half of respondents would have had their head around the concept of paying for news.
Did I just say that one of the differences between Bing and Google is that 
The media business continues to be a place where people keep asking a very good question–“How can we preserve investigative journalism and other pricey, important enterprises?”–and providing truly terrible answers. One current example: Connie Schultz of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who is