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Slate columnist Jack Shafer has accused me of essentially threatening, "Don't cut this newsroom budget or I'll shoot this investigative reporter!" That wasn't quite the point of yesterday's column , but here is Shafer's take . He likens my argument to cities threatening to close firehouses when faced with budget cuts:

"Journalists play a similar game whenever the bean counters order layoffs or buyouts in the face of tumbling or stagnating revenues: They equate the loss of warm bodies in the newsroom with the end of civilization. For instance, in a Sept. 16 piece, L.A. Times' Tim Rutten warns that budget cuts at his paper ordered by its owners will injure democracy and the public interest. In a Sept. 30 follow-up, he bemoans the damage done to Los Angeles Times stakeholders (readers, the city, the state, the West, Latin America, and the entire Pacific Rim) for the benefit of the Tribune stockholders who own the paper. In today's (Oct. 23) Washington Post, media reporter Howard Kurtz calls the press the "the first line of defense against public corruption" and writes that the 'corporate slashing' by news organizations will 'mean fewer bodies to pore over records at City Hall, the statehouse or federal agencies.'

"I rough up Rutten and Kurtz not because they're chowderheads. They're among the best in the journalism biz. But they speak for most in their craft when they somehow correlate the full employment of journalists with the common good. If there is a profession that doesn't think it's essential to the steady rotation of the planet around the sun, I've never heard of it. (A couple of years ago, a Harvard political scientist got so carried away with waving the flag for special interests that he declared that bowling leagues were vital to the commonweal, and their decline a tragedy.) . . .

"The idea that a newsroom should employ X hundred staffers because it has traditionally employed X hundred staffers ignores the changes technology has made in the news market. For instance, Tribune critics denounce it for cutting the foreign bureaus at the Baltimore Sun and Newsday, which it owns. But should every metropolitan newspaper keep its Moscow or Jerusalem bureaus when readers can click to Web coverage from the New York Times and the international press, especially when many of those papers are losing circulation? Something's got to give."

First of all (harrumph), I agree that some places are overstaffed, not all layoffs are bad, we all have to adjust to the digital age, yadda yadda yadda. But I'm simply trying to make the point that a) journalists have done some great work this year exposing corruption; b) when newsrooms cut staff by 20 percent, fewer people have to do more work to get the paper out, and that hurts investigative reporting. Not just special SWAT team yearlong projects, but the kind of enterprise reporting that a beat writer can do if he or she doesn't have to file every day.

Blogger David Roberts is steamed at CBS:

"The mainstream media has a bead on the blogosphere. They've got their story.

"'The blogs' is now short-hand for 'conspiricists, wackos, and (worst of all) partisans.' If a nightly news producer needs something slightly outre said, something outside the orbit of polite political dialogue, 'the blogs' are happy to say it for them. There are, after all, a lot of blog posts. They're bound to say anything."

Hmmm: Doesn't Katie have a blog?

"This makes the media lazy. Exhibit A: CBS [Evening] News did a story on the widespread belief that Bush & Rove are manipulating gas prices in advance of the mid-term elections. We're told the blogs are fairly abuzz with suspicion.

"For this, they mustered two blog screenshots:

"A random one-paragraph Daily Kos diary on 'gas prices and the elections.'