It is no secret that newspapers, losing readers and revenue to the Internet and other media, have, in some cases, turned to radical measures in order to stay relevant and afloat. A while back, a Washington Post story carried in the Bangor Daily News told of one such project at the Fort Myers News-Press.

The Florida newspaper employs a fleet of so-called mobile journalists, or “mojos” as they have become known. (In my opinion, the business began heading south when reporters started becoming known as “journalists.” But I won’t go there this morning.)

“The mojos have high-tech tools – ThinkPads, digital audio recorders, digital still and video cameras – but no desk, no chair, no nameplate, no land line, no office,” Post reporter Frank Ahrens wrote. “They spend their time on the road looking for stories, filing several a day for the newspaper’s Web site, and often for the print edition, too.”

Their guiding principle is that a constantly updated stream of intensely local, fresh Web content – regardless of its traditional news value – is key to building online and newspaper readership.

The “news story” of the moment that one mojo cited in the Post article was covering – complete with photos – took place at a strip-mall gymnasium and was hardly the highlight of a traditional reporter’s workday. It involved the signing of a fundraising calendar for the local Chamber of Commerce featuring the Hunks of North Fort Myers.

Several other innovations by the Florida newspaper’s hierarchy that “challenge journalistic orthodoxy” were described, including one that violates the fundamental rule of newspapering which calls for maintaining a solid wall between the news side of the paper and the advertising side.

It has reporters accompanying News-Press ad salespeople on trips to advertisers as the paper seeks sponsors for major feature stories it plans to do, the logic supposedly being that the reporter understands the deal and can best explain it to advertisers.

That seismic shift you just felt – a 7.5 on newspapering’s equivalent of the Richter scale – was caused by generations of old newspapermen and women from Horace Greeley on down the line spinning in their graves at the thought of such rank heresy. When it comes to a guiding principle, theirs was simple and to the point: News is news, and advertising is advertising, and never the twain shall meet. Otherwise, you can kiss goodbye all credibility with readers.

Newspapering’s graybeards blanch at the thought of such proposed chumminess between editorial and advertising, as well as the appointment of a managing editor in charge of “audience building,” and online message boards that allow readers to post anything from lost-pet notices to profanity.

But the thing that makes their cheeks go ashen, the train wreck waiting to happen, is undoubtedly the practice of allowing the new-age reporters to post their stories directly to the paper’s Web site, without editing – a blatant breach of newspaper protocol unheard of in even the sleaziest of supermarket tabloids. Talk about letting the inmates run the asylum. And talk about a media outlet setting itself up for a ripsnorter of a libel suit.

“It makes me crazy,” said Gale Baldwin, a News-Press assistant managing editor and newspaper veteran quoted in the Washington Post story. “But I grit my teeth because I know that things are changing.” Boy, are they ever.

We in the newspaper business, human to a fault, make enough mistakes – typographical, factual and otherwise – in our editorial and advertising content with editing. The mind cringes in contemplation of the horrors that might be unleashed upon an unsuspecting public were no editor tending the gate, figurative blue pencil at the ready, to save us from ourselves.

A careful editor can save the paper’s bacon when it comes to spotting major glitches in news copy that, left unrepaired, can earn the perpetrator and his bosses an expensive trip to court. A good one will also routinely catch the small stuff, counseling the rookie reporter that the phrase “remains to be seen” – as in it remains to be seen whether Gov. Baldacci’s school district consolidation plan has as much chance of survival as a snowball in Hell – is tolerable only when one is talking about viewing a corpse in a funeral parlor. The abomination will be excised, and mankind will benefit.

About the only beneficiaries I can picture emerging from the practice of publishing a reporter’s news story without it having been edited for content and accuracy would be the cadre of high-priced lawyers called in for damage control after the fact.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him via e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.