The future of journalism as a business is looking worse by the day, the practice of journalism less so. In the New York Review of Books, Michael Massing says that “the practice of journalism, far from being leeched by the Web, is being reinvented there, with a variety of fascinating experiments in the gathering, presentation, and delivery of news.” It’s mostly true.

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This image of the Internet as parasite has some foundation. Without the vital news-gathering performed by established institutions, many Web sites would sputter and die. In their sweep and scorn, however, such statements seem as outdated as they are defensive. Over the past few months alone, a remarkable amount of original, exciting, and creative (if also chaotic and maddening) material has appeared on the Internet.

Sorority dvdrip Massing cites the reporting done by the likes of Josh Marshall and his staff at Talking Points Memo, the relentless fact-checking and analysis of the blogosphere, and the fact that some websites are actually a better source for information than your daily paper – for the protests in Iran, the best place to go wasn’t The New York Times but Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish.

“The idea that our work is parasitical is farcical,” [blogger Marcy] Wheeler told me by phone. “There’s a lot of good, original work in the blogosphere. Half of all journalists look at the blogosphere when working on a story.” At the same time, she said, “I’m happy to admit I’m still utterly reliant on journalists…We ought to be talking about a symbiotic rather than a parasitical relationship,” she told me.

The problem is money: it’s extremely difficult to make any on the internet. And the content that bloggers consume and filter and analyze comes mainly from newspapers, which have to make money. Massing’s own examples bear this problem out. John Marshall of Talking Points Memo was a reporter before he started his website; he brought his contacts with him. ProPublica, a successful online reporting service, has received millions in grants. Blogger Philip Weiss made a reporting trip to Israel, but on $8000 in reader donations. It’s going to be difficult to get people to pay for what they already get for free. Andrew Sullivan, for one, is optimistic about the future of journalism and thinks the complacent, consensus-driven world of traditional news is getting what it deserves. He’s surely right about its failures and its cowardice, but he’s popular enough to merit a salary. Ask Marcy Wheeler or Philip Weiss how much they make.

-Greg Waldmann

Benny Morris, the Israeli historian, has recently written a new book about Israel and Palestine, but this one’s about the future, not the past. In the New York Times, Jeffrey Goldberg reviews One State, Two States

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and summarizes:

Morris…argues that Arab rejectionism is so profound a force that only the terminally obtuse could believe that Palestinians will ever acquiesce to a state complrised solely of the West Bank and Gaza.

Morris is a fascinating case: he’s a historian of conflict that hasn’t ended, and one he’s lived through his entire life. He’s considered the first of Israel’s “new historians,” who emerged in the late 1980’s in the midst of the first intifada to challenge the myths of Israel’s founding. But failure of the peace process and the second intifada that followed in 2000 led Morris to a radical about face – to a morbid view of the future of his country and a black view of its Palestinian counterparts.

You can actually see the change in the last chapter he tacked onto Righteous Victims when it came out in paperback in 2001, while the second intifada raged. Righteous Victims is still the best overall history of the conflict, but that last chapter should be read as the work of a different man. Editorializing also creeps into 1948, his excellent and mostly straightforward history of the first Arab-Israeli war, which I reviewed last year. Now he writes without the constraints of a historical perspective, and Goldberg rightly dismantles Morris’ new book and his “almost irretrievably dark vision of Israel’s future as a Jewish-majority state.”

Israel has just elected the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister, and he’s appointed the militant Avigdor Lieberman as his foreign minister. The terrorist group Hamas controls Gaza while the weak and corrupt Palestinian Authority dithers in the West Bank. Morris might be too close to the conflict to judge soundly, but his cynicism is understandable.

-Greg Waldmann

In the January 5 New York Times, Kenneth Chang reports on the photographs taken in the last month by the extraordinarily high-res camera in NASA’s Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter:

Images taken by the camera, able to see features down to about a yard in size, have revealed details like rippled textures in what had looked like bland dusty regions, and researchers can now count tiny craters, enabling them to better estimate the age of terrains.

This is obviously bed-wettingly exciting stuff for planetary geologists, who are using the findings to bolster the contention that Mars was in the distant past a far more hospitable place, “wet and maybe warm.”

But did Mars sustain life? And is life there now? No conclusive signs are offered in these most recent images, but the question is one that is always on the front of the minds of those doughty men and women who make the study of Mars their lives’ work. In our November 2008 issue, Astrid Van Sarisgaard reviewed three recent books about the red planet

, and found that most tantalizing question looming throughout all three. Click over to learn more about Mars–and stay for the comments field, which contains a discontented rebuttal from one of the book’s authors!