Is a niche opening up for providers of hard and boring FACT ?

The editor of our local newspaper has been caught out extravagantly embroidering the truth in order to conjure some moral high ground out of a tiny mole-hill, climb upon it and deliver a po-faced sermon about our health system. This is fairly typical behaviour for this newspaper, which leaps breathlessly from one moral crusade to another in order to fill its pages and portray itself as our guardian.

I wish it would stop.

I just want a newspaper to tell me some facts. Good, solid, reliable facts based on sound and impartial research. I can do the rest myself. I am quite capable of getting indignant on my own. I can see a conspiracy in a set of random and disconnected events without any assistance thank you very much. If I do have a problem, there is always the web, where every variety of sensationalist puffoonery is just a click away if I feel in the mood for a few oooohs and aaaahss and well-I-nevers.

The web is wonderful and I do love the power it brings to find out anything about anything quickly - as long as I'm prepared to take that anything with a large grain of salt. I don't expect everything I find there to be literally, or sometimes even remotely true. We get our news now from www.perthnow.com and, because it doesn't indulge itself in the low form of "investigative journalism" it's paper cousin favours, we feel better informed. What I'd really like to happen though, is for somebody to work out that a niche has opened up for a newspaper with rock solid credentials in providing unadulterated, gold plated facts and nothing else. It would be even better if there were two such papers, competing to be the most accurate. Then, I could feel really secure by comparing one with the other. The research needed to produce a paper like this would mean that it couldn't come out more than about once a week but that's OK. We probably have only about a weeks worth of news in a week in Perth anyway - when none of it is being generated by the paper itself that is.