I dispute your notion that people are "called" to vocations. It's not that easy, never that easy. People may move in some directions more quickly than other people, but that doesn't make it some sort of preternatural thing. David Lynch is regarded as possibly the foremost filmmaker of this generation, but he started off as an artist, and he still paints in his free time, and in the meantime he's recorded music and written stories. So is "painter" his calling? Or is it "director", even though that's not what he's most interested in?

I'm biased reading any David Simon article because I use the context of The Wire as sort of an opening to Simon's points in any article. One of the big themes of The Wire was how people don't easily care about things immediately outside of their own frame of reference. That means that cops don't care about anything beyond cophood, politicians only care about relevant political issues, and so on.

The Huffington Post doesn't care about local news. They don't care about issues in Baltimore specifically. They care about big generic things, and as such they miss the point more often than not. They're a pretty poor source even for online reporting. Even the best ones, though, don't focus superlocally like actually local papers do.

Simon's argument isn't that newspapers are wonderful and magical, though. His argument is that newspapers also failed us, after they started chasing sensationalism and yellow journalism. His second point, made here, is that too few bloggers care about things like this. A local blogger doesn't have the instant influence that a journalist for a paper does. As a result, the local stuff gets even more ignored, beyond the basic cheap local news that everybody knows and nobody cares about. That's a major problem, and it's not one that's easily fixed.