The New York Times is out of cash, Tribune Co. is bankrupt, CBS is going to be broken up into little-bitty pieces and 525 magazines closed last year alone. With the demise of all these various forms of media, you'd think that bloggers would be happy to see their main competition defeated. But you couldn't be more wrong. Below, some of the reasons we still need traditional media to stick around.

News isn't ubiquitous, opinions are

While smaller, online publications will be lucky to scoop one or two items a day before any competitors can get them, the mainstream media is still our primary source of news coverage. Send Maureen Dowd or David Carr off to Washington and tell them to cover Obama's recent press conference, and what you're going to get back is a scarce number of soundbites combined with the a lot of colorful rhetoric. As much as people complain about the 24-hour news cycle, it's channels like C-SPAN and BBC that are constantly covering events as they occur, no matter how dry or boring they might be. That allows opinion writers and video editors to take the best of whatever happened in a day, mash it up, and bring it back to you in easily digestible two-minute servings. But without the raw footage, we'd all just be approximating what happened on a day-to-day basis.

Where would the world be if all news sources were snarky blogs?

Yeah, there's a reason that the whole "citizen journalism" thing doesn't really work out. Many people can write, but few people have the skills to report objectively while in the middle of a high-pressure situation. As much as I value the funny musings of many blogs, there is no way I'm going to take Israeli-Palestine updates from Perez Hilton, even if drawing cum all over the Gaza Strip is funnier than what you'd normally find in AP.

Blogs still need something to write about
In 1997, Noam Chomsky wrote an article called "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream?" that was basically a breakdown of mass media at the time, and how the "elite media" as he called it, were always setting the agenda for smaller papers.

If you are watching the Associated Press, who grind out a constant flow of news, in the mid-afternoon it breaks and there is something that comes along every day that says "Notice to Editors: Tomorrow’s New York Times is going to have the following stories on the front page." The point of that is, if you’re an editor of a newspaper in Dayton, Ohio and you don’t have the resources to figure out what the news is, or you don’t want to think about it anyway, this tells you what the news is. These are the stories for the quarter page that you are going to devote to something other than local affairs or diverting your audience. These are the stories that you put there because that’s what the New York Times tells us is what you’re supposed to care about tomorrow. If you are an editor in Dayton, Ohio, you would sort of have to do that, because you don’t have much else in the way of resources.

Now things have changed since 1997, but you'd be naive to think that the MSM doesn't create an agenda that even the most fringe newsgroups follow. If they don't have the resources that they once did, publications like AP and The Times still set the standard, because they produce something to push back upon. Disagree with a Podunk paper in Jersey? Who cares. You pick a fight with the Times and that shit will spread like wildfire once Mediabistro gets a hold of it.

The MSM keeps big companies from becoming too powerful

You think G.E. makes any cash off of Brian Williams' pretty mouth? Or Westinghouse off CBS News? If they once did, they certainly don't anymore. These giant conglomerates that control our spin cycle ironically couldn't give less of a shit about the news, except that they can use it to sell their audience to other companies, in the form of commercials. And right now, the tightening drawstrings of advertisers means that no matter how many people are tuning in to watch your channel, big daddy General Electric is still (most likely) going to be losing dough. And while less money means layoffs, it also means that these companies will be in the handout line come bailout time. So technically, the government will be supporting the MSM. Time to be grateful for the dissenters over at Fox while you still can.

Old people still deserve to know what's up

Listen, if grandma didn't have her network news, she'd be forwarding you those crazy conspiracy spam emails at twice the rate she currently is. If for no other reason, the mainstream media benefits society because otherwise the elderly would have to get their news sources from elsewhere, and we all know that navigating the Internet can be a treacherous activity for the uninitiated.

We need Anderson Cooper in our lives

Not going to lie about this one. If you think that America could exist without the soothing, bashful presence of CNN's baby blues, you're kidding yourself. Without Anderson Cooper around, Kathy Griffin's New Years antics would have been appalling instead of hilarious. Without Anderson Cooper around, we'd have to go back to slap-fighting each other over Ricky Martin's sexuality. Anderson Cooper doesn't need us. We need Anderson Cooper.

Who will conspiracy theorists blame for brainwashing the masses?

And don't just say "the Jews." If all the major news sources fall and we're left with complete dissemination across various types of media, even getting updates about local politics will be harder than reading Ted Kaczynski's diary.