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The demise of print media happened when folks realized that Jeff Goldblum’s character in The Big Chill was right when he said that nothing in People magazine takes longer to read than the average cr@p. That was 1983 for you folks in the cheap seats.

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I do worry, however, that the role of the professional journalist will get lost in the transition as we wave goodbye to newspapers. As much as I love bloggers and web site owners, we *need* investigative journalism and pros who have been trained to ask the right questions and report accurately, succinctly, and responsibly. Otherwise, if pro journalists become extinct, it will be hard to know who to trust to provide content that is reliable and accurate.

Maybe someday we’ll evolve into making journalism training (techniques, ethics, legality, etc.) part of every child’s education because we’ll expect everyone to have these skills. I’d like to see that happen as we evolve into “long-tail” e-journalism.

And of course, I’ll be very interested to see how we handle libel issues as more people become the reporters.

Quasi-related: I would think seriously about getting a Kindle if (1) I could afford it right now and (2) they got auto-updating news feeds. Or do they have that feature already? I haven’t investigated yet because I’m trying not to feed my electronics addiction with more costly gadgets until we’ve paid for our oldest child’s college! ) But seriously, as print media dies out, we’ll have to see a quick rise in affordable, reliable portable news readers.

Re your comment that subscribers to print media are subscribing to the paper’s biases: Of course. Any writer filters his/her stories through a personal world view, and the story gets further enhanced or tainted by editors throughout the publication process. But that’s also true of any reporting, whether it’s amateur or professional, print-based or electronic. Trained journalists have the edge with education that harps on neutrality and the benefit of having multiple editors before publication to review for errors or omissions or biases. Bloggers have the edge with giving readers easy access to many diverse views.

I don’t think the pros are afraid of anyone discovering biases; I’m a former journalist, and I think they’re afraid that all the experience and training they bring to the table won’t be as visible or as valued online. It’s hard for readers to distinguish an amateur from a pro when so many web sites and blogs use good web design. It takes a deeper look at the contents to see how a pro offers judgment, training, and a thoughtful distillation and presentation of news.

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That, to some extent, is one of the big attractions of internet-based reporting: media writers don’t need to rehash background or delve into lengthy explanations but can, instead, link to them.

But I disagree with respect to the lack of bias within news stories. True, journalists are trained on neutrality but there’s a trend in journalism (at least on TV) favoring blatant bias. Witness, for instance, how CNN’s “Prime News” no longer sounds like news but, rather, another version of Glenn Beck’s show.

With respect to your point that readers may have difficulties discerning pros from amateurs, I do agree: but the pros who indulge in biased reporting aren’t helping that problem, are they? Hence my love of news aggregators that allow me to sort RSS feeds by topic, rather than by publication: I can see at one glance what the NY Times, for instance, says about McCain’s latest speech and right below it can check what NRO says about it, too.

Have to agree with you on the Kindle. I crave one. They do offer automatic content delivery for news subscriptions, but I think if I were to buy one I’d find myself having an existential crisis as I sat with my Kindle in one hand and my laptop to the other.