I described a new model of journalism that combines the immediacy of raw feeds with writing and editing skills to weave together a story. I think I touched on analysis only long enough to say that it's beside the point.

Yeah, you can provide analysis, any damn blogger can spew opinion labelled "analysis", and so what? Not everybody in the world can write and tell a coherent narrative. Journalists won't go away, they'll just recast their role minus direct observation and plus aggregation.

I think the result, once the dust settles, is likely to be a superior form of journalism based on a more efficient division of labor: Unskilled labor blanketing the globe acts as the eyes and ears on an as-needed basis at the minimum cost; and centrally-located paid writers and editors assemble the data streams into stories.

Not everybody's has the news jones as bad as you and me, Tom. Normal people have other things to do with their lives than try to drink directly from the firehose of raw datastreams available in the early 21st Century. How long until your head explodes from the overload?

Any good information system has the ability to hierarchically abstract upwards, providing top-level summaries into which you can dig back down to an arbitrary level for the detail you want. A good system of news dissemination will provide digests and summaries as well as raw detail. Best of both worlds.