"TAMPA—Sitting in my motel room Thursday on the fringes of Tampa, maybe 20 miles and three weather systems away from the convention site, I am surrounded by enough newsprint to equip a Broadway revival of The Front Page. These are all the newspapers, glossy magazine convention specials and other journalistic handouts that I have meant to read since I arrived on Sunday. Later today, when I arrive at my convention workspace, I will also have my pick of all the major newspapers this side of Le Monde. And (sorry to end this paragraph on a downer) I undoubtedly will read none of them.

Relax. This isn’t another jeremiad about the death of newspapers. At my first convention as a fledgling reporter—Miami Beach in 1968—I was awed to discover that stacks of dailies like the Washington Evening Star and the Chicago Daily News were flown in each morning as a promotional gesture. And sadly I never got around to reading them either..."

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"There has been a rush of fact-checking of recent comments made by Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan, but does this mean the traditional media’s obsession with objectivity and the “view from nowhere” has changed? Not really — which is why more alternative sources are necessary."

"There’s been a lot of sound and fury over Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s speech at the party’s national convention on Wednesday, and how it was riddled with inaccuracies, or what some prefer to call “demonstrably misleading assertions.” Is it news that a politician on the campaign trail would shade the truth, or use underhanded rhetorical tactics? Probably not, but the Ryan speech touched off a powder keg of emotion around the role that the traditional press plays in such acts of political theater, and whether the mainstream media deliberately downplays those kinds of falsehoods. If nothing else, such incidents show that the process of fact-checking and claim-debunking has to be distributed as broadly as possible — particularly to non-traditional sources."

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