NPR downgrades and disables its ombudsman

For those interested in what is happening in and to journalism, I strongly recommend Jay Rosen's blog [1] and Twitter feed. In particular, his work on The View From Nowhere [3] and the Church of Savvy [4] was very helpful to me in understanding how mainstream news, which is theoretically a vital guardian of our democracy, has become dangerously weak.

[1] http://pressthink.org/

[2] https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu

[3] http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-question...

[4] http://pressthink.org/2011/08/why-political-coverage-is-brok...

NPR seems to want to be more mainstream - their coverage of copyright and patent issues is pretty much MPAA-received wisdom, and their coverage of Snowden and NSA dragnet surveillance seems really unenthusiastic.

What's going on with NPR?