SOMEONE STILL HAS TO REPORT THE NEWS SO YOU CAN COMMENT ON IT:

A Vanishing Journalistic Divide (DAVID CARR, 10/10/10, NY Times)

In the closing months of the 2000 presidential campaign, I was working for Inside.com, a digital news site back when that was a novelty. I had left a job editing a Washington weekly and moved to New York City to join in the dot-com frolic, taking ribbing from my print colleagues at the time. At the farewell party, they performed a stirring and heartfelt parody of the song “Midnight Train to Georgia,” with the chorus changed to “Midnight train to nowhere.”

They were right. A year after I got there, the bloom was off dot-com world, the lack of a business model was manifest, and everyone who worked there had to scatter. But my print buddies were also so, so wrong. The Web, as I quickly found out, is a remarkably effective journalism machine.

As that 2000 presidential campaign was ending, I briefly spoke to someone from the campaign press plane and they revealed that a poll of beat reporters on the plane had shown a lopsided preference for Al Gore. Working in a room full of candy-colored Macs on the West Side of Manhattan, I typed up a few hundred words and pushed Enter.

Boom.

Within 10 minutes, news organizations pivoted around my little item and a nice kerfuffle ensued about the objectivity of the press. It was a moment for me, a look into the future when news would land hard no matter the platform or who pushed the button.

It was clear back then that the Web, with its low-cost, friction-free distribution, was a remarkable way to publish. But 10 years later, paying for reporting on the Web remains daunting. The reason that newspapers put all the white paper out on the street is that we get a lot of green paper back in return. Put out all the pixels you want, even ones that render scoops, and you will still receive pennies in return.

While the digital news business is still a riddle — most outfits will tell you they “will be profitable sometime next year,” which is what we used to say at Inside.com — the market has decided differently. Newsweek, a print magazine built up over decades, sold for a dollar this summer, while TechCrunch, a news and aggregation site founded five years ago, merited a reported $25 million in a sale to AOL.

The speed with which a media brand can be built out — see Huffington Post for the most breathtaking example — means that the barriers to entry that made the media business the province of titans are gone.

On a journalistic level, the new playing field is more even. Many people see the news in aggregated form on the Web, and when they notice a link that interests them, they click on it with nary a thought about the news organization behind it. Information stands or falls on its magnetism, with brand pedigree becoming secondary.

More and more, the dichotomy between mainstream media and digital media is a false one. Formerly clear bright lines are being erased all over the place. Open up Gawker, CNN, NPR and The Wall Street Journal on an iPad and tell me without looking at the name which is a blog, a television brand, a radio network, a newspaper. They all have text, links, video and pictures. The new frame around content is changing how people see and interact with the picture in the middle.

And reporting is not just the province of doughy old newspaper guys like me. Digital news players as diverse as Yahoo, Huffington Post, Gawker, Business Insider and AOL have all moved aggressively in the past few weeks to acquire additional journalistic talent in the belief that while aggregation has a place, it is not enough. News is the killer app.