The New York Times‘ David Carr stole the show at last night’s Intelligence Squared debate on the merits of the mainstream media, when he pulled out a print out of fellow debater Michael Wolff‘s Web site Newser all full of holes. Carr had cut out every story on Newser that came from the main stream media to prove his point: new media couldn’t exist without venerable mainstream pubs like the Times.

Ultimately, Carr’s side — debating against the proposition “Good Riddance to the Main Stream Media” — won the night, with 68 percent of the audience agreeing that we should not, in fact, say good riddance to the MSM. But Carr and his mainstream-representing colleagues, Phil Bronstein from the San Francisco Chronicle and the Nation‘s Katrina Vanden Heuvel, may have just lucked out. Their argument for maintaining the mainstream media seemed to simply boil down to the fact that there are some good things about it that need to be preserved, and new media is taking the best and claiming it for itself. Also, without the mainstream media, where would the debaters all work?

(More video and pictures after the jump)

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The New York Times may have only launched its San Francisco Bay Area section just last week, but it’s already finding itself in the midst of a controversy. Our sister blog BayNewser has the scoop:

Yesterday, San Francisco Chronicle Editor at Large Phil Bronstein wrote a blog post that “all but accused the New York Times of plagiarizing a Chronicle story about Oakland Police Chief Anthony W. Batts for its inaugural Bay Area edition last Friday,” BayNewser reports.

The Times issued a release today denying the allegations, and now Bronstein has published a mea culpa on The Huffington Post.

However, although Bronstein apologized for his ultimately incorrect assumption, he did take the Times to task for publishing a story that was basically told in two other California pubs:

“Times, don’t ignore all the good things I said in the post just because you’re the paper of record and you can — I expect a lot for $900-plus a year. Like a lead story in a news section that hasn’t shown up, in very similar form (or, in the case of the Long Beach Post-Telegram, in different form) everywhere else.”

Not Behind the Times; Bronstein Alleges the NY Times’ Bay Area Edition has Done . . . Well, Something — BayNewser

Most readers have heard by now that today will be Denver’s Rocky Mountain News‘ last. With the San Francisco Chronicle hanging in the balance, and Seattle holding discussions about what it would be like to be a no-newspaper town, one can only hope the RMN‘s closure isn’t just the first sign of what is to come. Meanwhile the RMN has put together this (well worth watching) good-bye vid which covers the last month of its existence and is currently running on their homepage.

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.