A news organisation's moral authority arises from its validation of the news. If something appears on the front page of the Guardian or the New York Times, we can be confident that people there have checked that it's right. Insofar as news sources have our trust, they have earned it by making sure that what they publish is right (and issuing immediate, full corrections when they're wrong).
In Australia, Fairfax just sacked its subs - and with them, it threw away its moral authority as a news organisation.
Newspapers don't break news - since the plane that went down in the Hudson River to Osama's execution yesterday, news breaks on Twitter, then on blogs, then on radio and TV. Newspapers don't have the only or the best writers, they don't own the only printing presses, they aren't the only way to find out what's going on or what it means.
A news organisation's unique selling point is the process by which it verifies and legitimates information, a process on which their reputation is built (see what happened to the Mirror when it emerged their Abu Ghraib photos were fiction - the immediate and evidently permanent loss of about 10% of the readers). Anyone can write anything they like, on Twitter or their own blog or in the comments on the BBC, but it's not until a recognised news authoriity checks it out that anyone takes it as more than an ubsubstantiated rumour. If the recognised news authorities out-source that validation, taking the subbing function outside the building, all they're doing is publishing words and letting someone check if those words are true. Even I can do that, and so can you. Actual news publishers would probably be better 0ff outsourcing the writing.
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