The Editor’s whinged about the trend towards lazy newspaper journalism before, citing an increasing reliance on ye olde “_____ returns 1,240,534 results on Google” chestnut. Adam 1.0 has also highlighted newspapers’ new reliance upon readers to do the journalism for them, with ye olde “if you’ve snapped a picture send it to us” plea.

But this effort in today’s Sunday Age is symptomatic of newspapers’ increasing reliance upon the blogosphere and random commenters for their research and copy:

Hooded of Sydney, posting on livingwithstyle.com, notes that Hungry Jack’s hold the Burger King franchise in Australia, and that there’s no Stacker Quad here as yet. But Hooded suggests there’s a market for it: “A friend of mine ate a double cheese and bacon from Mcdonalds with 12 extra slices of bacon. Cost about $15 all up. Then he puked it up about five minutes later. Well worth watching.”

Jesse from Sydney, responding to an online article in the Tampa Bay Times, observes: “Gee, I wonder why the US has an obesity epidemic?”

Big Jim, posting on theage.com.au’s entertainment blog, enthuses: “I don’t see what all the fuss is about. I think Australian parents today worry too much about food. I’m a big man, and I like my meals BIG.”

Arian, also at theage.com.au, may not have been quite as keen: “I can feel my heart clenching just looking at that thing.”

You can just see newspaper editors addressing their journalistic staff: “Right, this blogging thing seems to be taking off. I don’t know what blogging is but all the kids are doing it. We’ve got to embrace this boggling thing by having some boggles on our websites and using them as our source for the voice of the people. Go on, get out there and use the brogosphere as your research tool.”

That would be almost fine if 99% of the blogosphere wasn’t complete and utter dribble written by complete and utter morons. Sure, there’s some well researched and insightful content out there but it ain’t to be found on livingwithstyle.com or blogs.theage.com.au from the mouths of Jesse from Sydney or Kevin from Bathurst.

The Editor gathers his news from a range of sources: newspapers, magazines, television and the internet. Ed relies heavily on the blogosphere for an alternative source of information on a range of topics that can be critically incorporated into his wider understanding of current affairs and the world. The thing is, Ed pays his handful of dollars per week to a newspaper company in exchange for journalism, carried out by journalists — not a cheap rehashing of random blog content or unidentified blog comments.