I would tend to agree. I took a news writing course in college. We got a bullet point list about newsworthiness: 1) proximity 2) recency 3) prominence... and a

I would tend to agree. I took a news writing course in college. We got a bullet point list about newsworthiness: 1) proximity 2) recency 3) prominence... and a few others. They also taught us to write short paragraphs, short sentences, and use limited vocabulary. Further, you write stories in "inverted pyramid" style, where basically every sentence in an article is in decreasing order of importance, such that you can basically only read the first sentence of a story and know the whole thing. Given that, I think much of traditional news is pretty much replaced by twitter, youtube, facebook, blogs, etc. Your friends will do a good job of surfacing newsworthy stories. And reporting the facts is pretty easily done by tweeters, bloggers, and those capturing photos/video. Yet professional news writing about politics, weather, sports, and business will never go away because its crucial to society. Farmers need to know the weather. Vegas needs to know about sports scores. And investors need to know about business activity. All those groups will pay for that news. But investigative journalism, interviews, in-depth stories, and the like do have inherent value. I hope there are viable business models for people producing that content.