Time was, you could rely on wire-services like AP and Reuters to give you the most dry, non-partisan story out there. Just the facts ma'am, with none (well, supposedly none) of the journalistic biases that other papers would then go on to employ while taking quotes and tidbits from the original wire sources.

But nowadays, even the Associated Press needs to have an angle. What was once considered "breaking" on AP is now old news by the time blogs are done with it. With embedded citizen journalists on the campaign trail, wire-services now have to provide subscribers something different in order to compete, though their "solution" is to become the same as everyone else.

Goodbye objectivity, hellooooo new journalistic standards.

This would be the impetus, one assumes, for that insane prejudge on Obama's DNC speech by AP that had everyone up in arms. And then the international AFP did the same thing with Palin's RNC speech!

So is the whole wire-service program becoming just another blog war casualty?

"I worry that their strategy is too 2004 Web and not a 2008 approach to the Web," says Dick Keil, a former AP reporter who spent 20 years working for wire services before becoming a political consultant. "It's like New Coke — it seems cool now, but just wait. It could bring down the whole company: They have a recognized, respected and trusted brand and identity, and they are moving in a radically new direction likely to make the vast majority of their subscribers uncomfortable."

Valid concern. But how else can wire services compete with college kids and their Macbooks and YouTube? Though losing credibility at an alarming rate, this is actually the only way to grab people's attention anymore: through opinionated pieces that get picked up, argued, and discussed by other blogs and papers.

It's not 2004 approach, because in 2004 there credibility was still valued over unique pageviews. But boy, did Drudge Report prove that old adage wrong.

This is 2008's world baby, we only live in it.