What value do news­pa­pers add to inform­a­tion? A couple of days ago, I book­marked this piece on product place­ment, from the New York Times. Basic­ally, it’s about cof­fee cups appear­ing on the desk dur­ing a local morn­ing news show in Las Vegas.

The Las Vegas Sun repor­ted it first on Monday:

Oooooooh, they’re call­ing out your name.

Two cups of McDonald’s iced cof­fee (BUY!) sit on the Fox 5 TV news desk, a punch-you-in-the-face product place­ment (BUY!) to chase down your morn­ing news.

Quoted? Fox 5 news dir­ector, Adam Brad­shaw, and Kelly McBride of the journ­al­ism eth­ics outi­fit, Poynter. The New York Times hat tips the Las Vegas Sun, ditches the breezy style — and the line that the cof­fee and ice cubes are fake — and clocks up eight quoted sources in under a thou­sand words.

And then Tom Leonard of the Tele­graph told it yes­ter­day, with a little his­tor­ical col­our and just a quote from Brad­shaw. He men­tioned both the NYT and LVS. The Guard­ian’s Ed Pilk­ing­ton popped in an addi­tional quote from a hitherto unheard-from Poynter pundit.

So what’s the bene­fit here? Are rewrites journ­al­ism? Is the news busi­ness busy eat­ing itself?

The ori­ginal ‘fun’ piece got the ‘shock and awe’ treat­ment from the NYT, before being trans­lated back into some­thing for a dif­fer­ent audi­ence. Would Roy Greenslade’s present­a­tion — in a blog with the rel­ev­ant links — have been the best way to tell the story online?

Jeff Jar­vis argued in Cover What You Do Best, Link To The Rest:

In the rear­chi­tec­ture of news, what needs to hap­pen is that people are driven to the best cov­er­age, not the 87th ver­sion of the same coverage.

Well yes, journ­al­ism is on one level about inform­a­tion, but it’s all about audi­ence. Most Tele­graph and Guard­ian read­ers — in their capa­city as inform­a­tion absorbers rather than seekers — prob­ably don’t sub­scribe to the NYT media sec­tion, or care about the story suf­fi­ciently to enter into it with the depth and grav­ity of the NYT, or even want to click through to it, but they might want to be aware of it. And they might want that pack­aged in a cas­ual but enter­tain­ing way.

This is where the Brit­ish journ­al­istic tra­di­tion of caring more about the writ­ten word (see res­taur­ant critic Giles Coren’s impas­sioned defence of the indef­in­ite art­icle here), than per­haps the facts (see the FT’s Gideon Rach­man on US vs UK journ­al­ism), con­flicts with Jar­vis’ idea of a com­mod­it­ised, fact-based media.

My solu­tion to that con­flict? Arm-wrestling.