Don Surber writes that while there's talk of outsourcing coverage of local events in American newspapers to overseas reporters, readers are more than willing to go overseas themselves for a story if it doesn't fit the seemingly monolithic MSM's template:

As my next post pointed out, the major American newspapers continue to ignore the story of a graphic torture handbook being discovered at an al-Qaeda safehouse.

They were awfully quick to play up the UN’s latest cheapshot at the US. An organization whose human rights council includes every human rights violator from Burkina Faso to Zimbabwe should be laughed off the world stage.

Instead, the American newspapers treat UN press releases like the holy grail.

But American readers have the Internet. And foreign nations are publishing reports on al-Qaedan Torture — actual torture, no panties on the head or False Stories about flushed Korans.

It will be interesting to see if op-eds start appearing in newspapers discussing the torture manual--assuming that's the case, it will be yet another example of opinion writers assuming that their readers are more than a little familiar with an event that their local newspapers couldn't be bothered to report. Or as I wrote a few months ago:

In the early days of the Blogosphere, the mantra was that while Big Media would do the reporting, you'd go the Blogosphere for opinion. But increasingly, it's been the Blogosphere that's been doing the heavy lifting.

That post has numerous example of this phenomenon in action; there will be many more to come in the next few years.

Update: More on this topic from Ed Morrissey.