Web sites, blogs hardly future of journalism

Preposterous, the idea that “newspapers look to blogs as the future of journalism.”

That was the headline, anyway, regardless of the fact many of us have no early idea what blogs are – even though we’re told a “blogger” is one who expresses him/herself online.

Hmmm. Online. That must be the key to the entire information highway these days, yet there are those newshounds and communication consumers who prefer print media to electronic and we’re still traveling the same highway. Maybe we’re the ones who wait to go through the toll booth, while the keyboard surfers pass through the express lane. Blogs. Online. Web sites.

At the Greensboro, N.C., News & Record, a 93,000-daily circulation newspaper, editors and reporters have launched an online experiment to attract young people and, obviously, other readers who look to computers rather than newsstands.

The News & Record’s Web site features staff-written journals, or blogs, including online forums on various topics ranging from safety at a local high school to public records on property ownership, marriages and divorce.

So much for being the “paper of record.”

Is this the newspaper of the future? The industry-watching magazine Editor & Publisher had this to say: “When the paper’s overhaul is complete, it may be a model for the sort of 21st century paper that many journalism big thinkers have been talking about, chewing over, and confabbing on for the last few years.”

Hmmm. “Confabbing on”?

Which brings us back to preposterous, absurd, ludicrous. Are news readers going to prefer blogs when they can sit on a subway and shield themselves by a fully opened newspaper?

Is journalism going to content itself with Web sites rather than printer’s ink that smudges the reader’s fingers while he/she sips coffee with one hand and holds an op-ed page with the other for total involvement?

The question the Greensboro newspaper apparently asked itself was, “How do we survive in an industry with declining circulation, vitriolic criticism of the press coverage of recent news stories, in addition to the scandals involving scurrilous reporters who passed fiction off as fact and who inevitably left the whole barrel of us apples rotten – if not literally – at least by smell?”

According to disappointing statistics by the Pew Research Center, the percentage of people who say news organizations often report inaccurately has hovered around 56 percent. Thus, readership has been eroded especially among young people, 71 percent of whom reportedly read newspapers in 1967 compared with 42 percent in 1999.

Back again to preposterous. It’s not that we’re anti-Web sites for newspapers. Such online availability of information benefits us all. It’s just ridiculous to think the reading public will ever discard its hands-on, intimate, physical connection with newsprint. It’s preposterous to think blogs are the future of journalism.

How would we ever light the woodstove without a newspaper, or train a puppy, or wrap fish, or line a parakeet’s cage, or stuff a gift box? Or refer to, or clip from, or compare with, or set aside for further scrutiny, or pass over to a neighbor, or save for a scrapbook?

What’s preposterous is not the newspaper itself but that the print media, proudly known as the press, has forgotten its charge.

James Russell Wiggins – of Washington Post and Ellsworth American legends – said this in a speech in 1976: “The power thus entrusted to the press ought to be exercised without arrogance and in a kind of humility consistent with the secondhand authority that is involved. The newspapers do not own ‘press freedom’ in fee simple. They are its custodians.”