As Joe wrote about last July, The Noisy Apprentice is a weblog by the folks at Voice of San Diego which is meant to serve as “a sort of gray area where the stoic wall of separation between professional media and the community could come down for the sake of interesting discussion.”

The only problem: it hasn’t been updated since November. But not to worry, because the Voice of San Diego has a new weblog entitled, This Just In: San Diego’s Breaking-News Blog. Only that it doesn’t look like a weblog at all. No RSS feed, no permalinks, no comments, no trackbacks, no … oh wait, there are posts. And to the “paper’s” credit, it seems like most of the journalists are making an effort to make public their behind-the-scenes investigating and discussions.

Still, if The Noisy Apprentice was meant to be a nexus of interaction, This Just In is anything but. It reinforces the idea that readers of news are merely consumers of news. A view which one would think a next-generation news site like the Voice of San Diego would have transcended.