The Internet Era: Old News and New Bottles

News today is what it always has been: information about significant or interesting events, valuable data to help readers, viewers, and now Internet surfers make better sense of the world in which they live.

"News" is JonBenet Ramsey, Nancy and Tonya, wall-to-wall Princess Diana, and O.J. Simpson. Sometimes the plethora of "news" can make it seem as if news has vanished altogether. It hasn't, of course.

News today is very much a half-filled, half-empty situation. It depends on which part of the glass you are focusing on. Take the recent survey that found that in February, the television newsmagazines were dominated by coverage of the television programs Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? Could there be any more powerful indication that the apocalypse is at hand? That greed and voyeurism and just plain silliness are dominating not only television entertainment but television news as well? A vast wasteland indeed.

And yet the night before that sad survey surfaced, I had attended National Public Radio's thirtieth birthday party. In just three decades, a radio operation aimed at those who crave substance and depth rather than sound bites had become a fixture in American life.

Or take USA Today. In its early days, the nascent national newspaper, with its splashy color, folksy tone, gonzo weather map, and short, really short, stories epitomized the dumbing-down of the American newspaper. And though the paper bled red ink for quite some time, that didn't stop many other newspapers from aping its cotton candy approach to journalism.

But mark what happened. USA Today, its Technicolor and weather map intact, evolved little by little into a serious newspaper, with real news, lots of it, cohabiting with the celebrity news and the sports agate. As the millennium wound down, reporters were actually leaving the Washington Post to go to work at the erstwhile McPaper, a development that would have been unthinkable only several years before.

As the editor of American Journalism Review, I am often asked to judge journalism contests. And each time I say yes, I end up being glad I did. What's most gratifying is seeing some of the excellent work in unheralded newspapers where you would least expect it.

The flurry of high-profile ethical lapses in recent years has heightened a sense of crisis in the world of news. The spate of plagiarism cases, Tailwind, Chiquita - it all suggests a frightening collapse of standards.

But are things really getting worse? Or is it just that the industry is more open about its shortcomings?

It is my sense that there is far more willingness to own up to mistakes than in the past. Jerry Ceppos, former executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News, scored big points when he wrote an article acknowledging serious flaws in his paper's much-ballyhooed series alleging a link between the CIA and the crack cocaine epidemic. This was not only the right thing to do; it was the smart thing to do.

In fact, there are more reform efforts under way in the field of journalism than at any time I can recall. Sounds healthy. But how big a difference will it all make?

There is a tendency after each dark patch - an explosion of sensation-saturated news episodes, a campaign with coverage dominated by sideshows rather than substance - for journalists to gather at conferences and wallow in self-criticism. But it's not unusual for them to repeat their behavior at the next opportunity. This phenomenon has been likened to the case of the guy with the hangover who vows to quit drinking, then changes his mind when the bars reopen. Let's hope that's not the case now.

Perhaps the biggest influence on the future, not to mention the present, of news is the Internet. In tandem with...