The Baltimore Sun is to lose two of its foreign bureaux over the next 18 months. Its owner, the Tribune group, has decided to close offices in Moscow and Johannesburg. So far, so bad. But note this quote from a plainly unhappy, if resigned, Sun editor, Timothy A. Franklin:
"We're competing in a different environment than we were five, 10 years ago. International news is more of a commodity than ever because of the internet."
More a commodity? Makes you think, doesn't it? But directly you do think about it, you have to wonder if he's right. Indeed, is Franklin actually failing to ask himself the right question? Surely it's not so much that news itself is a commodity as the fact that news-gathering is becoming too costly for news-gatherers at a time of rapidly falling revenues. The transformation of news into a commodity was achieved long ago - due entirely to the nature of the capitalist economy - and the internet has made it more available. Isn't Franklin guilty of confusing the situation?
