The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Why the mainstream media is dying

Every once in a while you get to see a mainstream outlet cover a story right alongside a blog, so you can put them up against each other and see why one was so much better than the other. This week TechCrunch and the New York Times (photo) provided just such a lesson.

Let's just say, the New York Times come off looking like a pack of fools. Read the whole thing, please.

Partly this is due to the fact that TechCrunch is a specialty publication -- when you have an economics story, The Economist is likely to do better coverage than, say, Newsweek. But that is a benefit of the blog format: focus. Blogs have a 'beat' just like old-school reporters do; and while a general purpose news outlet might cut back on coverage of some beat when times get lean, that's not going to happen at a blog whose brand is built around specifically that type of coverage.

I agree with FSJ; if the old-media outlets die out, we'll be just fine, maybe even better off.