Anybody want to send me to Iraq?

Pay me, I'd love to go. I'd also love to cover Capitol Hill or the White House on a regular basis. But first, pay me.

This, in reference to the punditry/reporting argument being kicked around by, inter alia, Ed Driscoll, Glenn Reynolds and Jules Crittenden. The problem with demanding more reporting is that somebody's got to pay for that reporting.

Just last night, I was at a party talking to a lawyer who's done work at Guantanamo, and who suggested I should go down and do some reporting there. Well, OK, fine -- love to do it. But who's going to pay to send me down there?

You send a reporter to cover Capitol Hill full-time, and he's got to grind out a lot of story-of-the-day coverage on his way to developing the sources necessary to get the Big Scoop that (maybe) justifies his salary. It's an expensive proposition. The Politico started out with the two top political reporters from the WaPo and got more Drudge links than you could shake a stick at, and yet they're still in the red.

Meanwhile, the journalistic "farm system" is drying up. I talk to my old newspaper buddies in Georgia and the horror stories they tell! A 5% across-the-board pay cut, on salaries that were already pathetically low. The alternative was company-wide layoffs, even though they've already cut their news staffs to the bone. Similar stories abound throughout the news industry, and are much, much worse at community newspapers in small-to-medium markets where "liberal bias" isn't even possible as an explanation.

The Internet has not (yet) generated the kind of revenue stream necessary to fund (many) full-time reporters. Paul Mulshine has a point, even if he shouldn't have attacked Insty to make it. With every passing week, there are fewer and fewer reporters to cover the basics of the news -- school boards, county commission meetings, cops-and-courts, etc. The result is a less-informed citizenry, and this is a real loss.

UPDATE: Don Surber has more thoughts. I think I'm about as blogger-friendly as any journalist on the planet, and hostility between bloggers and reporters strikes me as atavistic. There is a lot of misunderstanding on both sides.

What do bloggers do? Well, they do a lot of different things, but the most important thing the news/politics blogger does is aggregate -- they sift through news to find what interests him, links it and comments on it. In this, the blogger functions somewhat like a newspaper editor, except that (a) he doesn't assign stories to reporters, and (b) generally, he doesn't feel the need to provide comprehensive coverage.

On point (b): Bloggers take for granted that the reader is surfing around through multiple information sources and, if he wants the latest news on the Caylee Anthony murder or the coup in Guinea, he'll find that somewhere. No blog is or aspires to be a one-stop news outlet, which leaves the blogger free to aggregate and comment on the news that seems to him most interesting or where he thinks he can gain more readers. (I blog about politics, but I also blog about Christina Hendricks, because somebody has to.)

Which leaves us with point (a): While there are bloggers who do reporting, and other bloggers who do online research that substantially enhances the news content they provide, there is no blog that can deploy people to do first-source reporting in the way that newspapers, wire services and other Old Media news organizations do.

This is where a lot of bloggers go off track in criticizing Old Media. The cult of "professionalism" in journalism produces a backlash, so that intelligent people outside the news business look with resentment toward industry insiders as some sort of privileged caste. Too many journalists emit messages of elitism: "We know what we're doing because we're professionals -- and since you're not a professional journalist, your criticisms of us have no credibility." There is a circular logic here that is infuriating.

As infuriating as this kind of media snobbery may be, it does not negate the fact that somebody has to do the first-source reporting, and it is that kind of reporting that is being jeopardized by the deep cuts in newsroom staffs. I love the blogosphere, but certainly in the near term, blogs are not going to fill the void created by the evisceration of American newsrooms.

Do a thought experiment: Suppose that Pajamas Media wanted to establish a Washington bureau. At the very minimum, you'd need three full-time staffers: One for the White House, one for Congress, and a "swing" reporter who'd cover the departments and agencies (Justice, State, Pentagon, etc.) while backstopping the other two. Even lowballing the salaries, you'd be looking at something like $120,000-$150,000 a year for that three-man bureau, not including benefits, payroll taxes, etc. (This assumes the bureau would have no actual brick-and-mortar office. It also assumes no travel budget, so when the president flies off to Brussels for a G8 summit, you don't get on-the-spot reporting.)

Would the reporting produced by a three-man shoestring D.C. bureau justify such an investment for an online operation like PJM? Consider that Cox Enterprises -- which owns 17 papers and generates annual revenue of $15 billion -- recently closed its D.C. bureau. If having a Washington bureau doesn't make sense for a giant media conglomerate like Cox, how does it make sense for PJM?

However much you loathe Old Media, then, the shriveling of the press corps must inevitably result in less reporting, and it is very difficult to see how New Media can ameliorate that loss.

UPDATE: Linked at Political Byline and Pirate's Cove (with bonus pinup).