Much more provocative is David Sirota’s new column, which pins the blame for the industry’’s collapse on the newspapers themselves:

Beltway scribes didn’t have to miss the Iraq war lies or the predictive signs of the Wall Street meltdown. Election correspondents weren’t compelled to devote four times the coverage to the tactical insignifica of campaigns than to candidates’ positions and records, as the Project for Excellence in Journalism found. Business reporters didn’t need to give corporate spokespeople twice the space in articles as they did workers and unions, as a Center for American Progress report documents. National editors weren’t obligated to focus on “elevat(ing) the most banal doings” in the White House to “breaking news,” as the New York Times recently noted.

But that’s what happened. Rather than investing in the valuable steel and concrete of hard reporting, national news outlets began printing the most worthless kind of commercial paper - rumors, personality profiles and other such speculative derivatives that consumers could find elsewhere. News, in short, mimicked finance: Just as Wall Street made bets on bets with credit default swaps and then watched investors bolt, print journalism mass produced gossip about gossip, and now sees its audience flee.

They want to maintain and restore confidence. But we’re now looking at a bifurcation of attitudes. Wall Street and other big business insiders take a different view of what sort of steps inspire confidence than do most people. To most people…the Wall Street whiz kids are, themselves, jokes and what would restore confidence is some kind of sense that they’ve had their asses kicked and some new people are brought in the run the show. But to the insiders, it’s just the reverse—they want themselves and their pals to continue to control the commanding heights of the economy.

In a New Republic article called “The Geithner Disaster,” John B. Judis sums up the case against the Treasury Secretary. Echoing Yglesias, he notes that “in almost everything that Geithner has done, he has roused this populism by appearing to be a patron of Wall Street.” Judis stops short of calling for Geithner’s resignation, but his critique is withering nonetheless.

Over at The Nation website, editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel proposes a last-ditch, not-so-family-friendly idea for getting the administration back on the populist track: appoint Eliot Spitzer as Treasury Secretary.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has published its final print issue. Staffers recount their stories over at CJR. (For image, hat tip to Gawker.)

This morning, the Washington Post printed an A-1 story that mentions how papers — including the Post itself — neglected to cover this item as a major world event:

In 2003, when America began its occupation, bombings with half the casualties of Tuesday’s suggested the United States might not prevail. Today, when America and its Iraqi allies seem to be winning, the attack failed to make the front page of the government newspaper.

For reasons too obvious and numerous to mention, this is an important story. “It was like the day Baghdad fell,” said the brother of one victim. But almost as important is the Post’s oblique mea culpa — the newspaper’s decision not to let this tragedy lie fallow just because it neglected to cover it properly when it was “breaking news.”

In a Sunday Washington Post article, Simon did some hands-on reporting in Baltimore, following up on the story of a trigger-happy policewoman who may have been involved in a recent shooting. His frustration at the Sun’s lack of initiative is palpable, as is his anger at the fact that the city’s police force is no longer accountable to the press. Simon’s big-picture conclusions about the death of the industry are spot-on, and pose a definite challenge:

Half-truths, obfuscations and apparent deceit — these are the wages of a world in which newspapers, their staffs eviscerated, no longer battle at the frontiers of public information. And in a city where officials routinely plead with citizens to trust the police, where witnesses have for years been vulnerable to retaliatory violence, we now have a once-proud department’s officers hiding behind anonymity that is not only arguably illegal under existing public information laws, but hypocritical as well.

There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.

Well, sorry, but I didn’t trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick’s identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn’t anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.

I didn’t trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that’s the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.