The Project for Excellence in Journalism found that news coverage on TV, in newspapers and online is becoming shallower and more repetititive. On one day, Google News listed 14,000 stories on only 24 subjects.

This is not a big surprise, but it’s troubling nonetheless. The gradual decline of mainstream media as a business has led to cutbacks in reporting staffs and less original news. The other day, one of the Boston TV stations led the 6 p.m. news with the story of a moose in the front seat of a car. It was an interesting subject, I must admit, but last I checked, Iraq was on the brink of civil war. I think the station mentioned that after the weather.

There is a blogosphere crowd that delights in the decline of mainstream media but I think they’re foolish and short-sighted. There is nothing good about having fewer reporters on the streets. Bloggers do an excellent job of interpreting and analyzing the news, but they aren’t going to sniff out a story and spend months cranking through documents and interviewing sources the way a good reporter does. For that, you need professional journalists and organizations that support them.

Unfortunately, outside of a few elite publications, those organizations are becoming fewer and fewer. Most news departments are so budget-poor these days that they can’t afford to pay really experienced reporters. So the core of their news staff consists of recent college grads supporting a small number of “name” journalists. Professional journalists increasingly have to make their living working for corporate marketing departments.

I’d like to think the rise of social media will change all this but I see no reason why it will. If anything, words are becoming a commodity and that means that people who create words for a living will have to seek work elsewhere. The risk of the blogosphere is that it becomes a forum for a million Rush Limbaughs: people who spew and vent but don’t really contribute anything useful. Maybe someone will figure out a business model for reinventing news journalism out of a community of bloggers. I hope so.