Are scoops still important?

Many of the things Sarah Palin has done are probably no worse than some of the things Mitt Romney/Joe Lieberman/Joe Biden/any other VP candidate have done, but the reason the press is focusing on them is because the press had never heard of any of them. That's Jack Shafer's diagnosis, and I think it's 100% correct.

But this leads me to a second point - how important are scoops anyway? If the Washington Post scoops the Baltimore Sun on a story about Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, do Sun subscribers leave en masse and sign up for the Post? I don't think so. That's an odd example, because the papers aren't direct competitors, but there are very few direct competitors left in the newspaper industry.

For example, The Boston Globe isn't really competing with the Boston Herald. They're going after two different sets of geographical, political, cultural, etc. demographics. Generally, both papers are competing against everything else people could do with their time: play Scrabulous, watch a movie, etc.

But I don't think many journalists or newspaper execs realize this yet. People like to know about the news, but very few have to read the newspaper. Or, to put it another way, it's not the Huffington Post that's killing newspapers, but the internet in general. The 30 minutes someone once spent reading the paper isn't automatically going to reading online news (although it oftentimes probably is), it could be going to watching an episode of Arrested Development on Hulu.