David Simon on cutting "The Wire"

What do you mean by that?

[The season] begins with a very good act of adversarial journalism -- they catch a quid pro quo between a drug dealer and a council president -- which actually happened in Baltimore. Not necessarily the council president, but between a drug dealer and the city government. That whole thing with the strip club? That really happened in real life. It was news. The Baltimore Sun did catch that, it was good journalism, so I was honoring good journalism. It ends with an honorable piece of narrative journalism, about Bubbles. And the Baltimore Sun has, on occasion, done very good narrative journalism.

In between those bookends, which I thought were important, because in our minds we weren't writing a piece that was abusive to the Sun or any other newspaper ... the paper misses every story. They miss that the mayor wants to be governor, so ultimately the guy who was the reformer ends up telling people to cook the stats as bad as Royce ever did. Well, in Baltimore that happened. And they missed the fact that the third-grade test scores are cooked to make it look like the schools are improving, when in fact it doesn't extend to the fifth grade, and that No Child Left Behind is an unmitigated disaster. They set out to do a story on the school system, but they abandoned it for homelessness because they're sort of reed thin. Prosecutions collapse because of backroom maneuvering and ambition by various political figures, speaking of Clay Davis ... And when a guy like Prop Joe dies, he's a brief on page B5.

That was the theme, and we were taking long-odd bets that very few journalists would even sense it. That would be the critique of journalism that really mattered to me, because we've shown you the city as it is, and as it is intricately, for four years. It was all rooted in real stuff.

Well, to be fair, reporting at a deep level is an incredibly difficult and largely thankless job.

Hardest job I ever had.

You certainly demonstrated the huge gap between a great reporter like Twigg, who gets pushed out, and a mediocre reporter like Templeton. Templeton walks around in the city looking scared, and sure, he's sort of pathetic, but it's also easy to relate to that, and you can sort of see where it all begins.

Good reporting is epic.

But where's the motivation, when you're paid next to nothing and your editor doesn't know the difference anyway?

And how are you going to go more than surface deep if the veterans, the guys who've worked there for 10 or 15 years, the ones who understand the city dynamic, they're the ones being ushered out the door, because they're the more expensive players?

Well, and they also have strong opinions. The yes men will always survive while the cranky pros get axed.

Absolutely. When I went into journalism, there was this naive belief -- although it didn't seem naive at the time, because I was coming in after Watergate and after [journalist David] Halberstam and after a lot of cool stuff -- that newspapers were going to become better and deeper and more sophisticated, and they were going to start acquiring reality in ever larger chunks. And that would be part of my overall critique, which you can't obviously do in the confines of "The Wire" because it's set in the now, it's not set in 1985. But when the papers were fat ... the afternoon papers got killed by TV, but the ones that survived that were the monopoly papers in their town, like the Sun. They were fat. And at that moment, that was when Wall Street became the paradigm. When the chains bought up everything and they took profits.

Making a profit was their downfall, essentially.

Making an 18 percent profit and thinking that there was nothing else on the horizon and you were the only game in town ... You can't tell me that they were saving the money for a rainy day. Nobody knew that the Internet was going to be what it was. Nobody at my paper did, anyway. And now it is what it is, and there is no money, and they didn't spend the window that they had building something that was so essential and so vibrant and so necessary to understanding the world well that you couldn't do without it. Guess what, I'll pay for online advertising. Shit, I'll pay to be part of your Web site for 10 bucks a month. The chance to create a product where the Internet paradigm would've worked and been profitable, it was pissed away.

Did you think about putting the whole question of the Internet into the Sun's story?

It is in the story in the one place it needs to be in. It doesn't need to be anywhere else. It's in there as the economic preamble, when Whiting gets up on the desk and says, "We have to close the foreign bureaus, and we're going to have another round of buyouts. This is a hard time for newspapers. The Internet is free..." -- whatever it is he says.

If you're saying that there needed to be scenes of the Internet interacting with journalism and bringing down journalism, I will now write you a scene: Interior, garden apartment anywhere. A white male, mid-30s, sits at a laptop computer in his underwear, linking to a Baltimore Sun story. He then scratches his left testicle until satisfied and continues to type commentary about that story onto his blog. Cut to drug corner, and on to the next scene.

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