Listening to David Simon (creator of TV’s “The Wire”) is like putting your ear to a conch shell and hearing the distant sound of invisible America..

He was a guest of R4′s “Start the Week” to talk about his books. ‘Homicide’ and ‘The Corner’- both the results of year-long observations of the drugs market in his homw town, Baltimore.

His thesis is simple: the underclass in post-industrial America is no longer needed. The jobs that they were educated to do – by a failing school system – no longer exist. In Baltimore alone, the unemployment rate for male African-Americans is 50%. Their response has been to to create an alternative economy – capitalism taken to the nth degree – which keeps thousands employed.

(If you know ‘The Wire’, that’s best exemplified by Stringer Bell’s business course and his obsession with distribution and ‘product’.)

How is this related to the above blog posting? Simon spent 20 years as a journalist on The Baltimore Sun. He makes the point that he wouldn’t have spent a year in a homicide unit, learning the dynamics, building relationships, calling people at home, meeting them for a beer, going out on patrol, if he hadn’t been working for an employer who provided pay and benefits.

“There’s a lot of fluff and commentary on the internet” he says. “Some of the commentary is very good; most of it is juvenile. But you can’t do real journalism as a hobby.”

Here again, Simon’s home turf is a microcosm of the impact the Web is having on traditional publishing models. When he had his ‘beat’, the Baltimore Sun had 500 staff, produced two editions a day, and was one of three city papers. Today it employs 160, and is the only game in town.

Which presents another internet paradox. While the Pirate Party campaigns for total access and the negation of copyright, it may be helping to create a less well-informed population that has little idea of what to do with the freedoms it gains.

Are we in a tailspin with no end? Despite his background and subject matter, Simon is not all doom-and-gloom.

“The (Washington) Post and the (New York) Times provides 60% of the ‘real news’ output in America. If they both decide to charge for access, that would re-write the rules.”

The FT and the Wall Street Journal already charge – but as their information is directly connected to money, their readers’ perceived value is very clear. Now that the general news horse has left the stable, we’ll have to see if the major news providers can corral it back in.