There is a wonderful scene in State of Play, Kevin McDonald's flawed, but thought-provoking, political thriller, when Cal McAffrey, the grizzled, oddly uncynical investigative reporter played skillfully by Russell Crowe, explains to the young gossip blogger from his newspaper's online group why he spends so much time checking and re-checking leads, working his sources, and making sure he has all the verifiable and double-sourced facts available before he lets go of a story:

"I still think they (readers) know the difference between real news and bullshit," he says. "And they're glad that someone cares enough to get things on the record and print the truth." 

For the sake of our democracy, I pray that he is right.  But the signs are not encouraging.  

The blurring of the distinction between "content" and "news" within mainstream news organizations is a runaway train that has already left the station.  Here in New York, for example, WNBC, Channel 4 has taken to calling its news center "the content center."   CNN now spends an enormous amount of air time promoting its blog and its Facebook page and its million+ Twitter followers.

But, content is not necessarily news.  News is the verifiable facts that trained, responsible journalists like Cal McAffrey often spend hundreds of hours tracking down and sifting through and verifying to get to the truth.  Real reporting is time-consuming and expensive.  It requires a level of investment that many traditional print and broadcast news organizations can no longer afford in the face of the tsunami of free content that is the web.

The problem is not the widely-lamented "death" of newspapers.  Newspapers are a medium around which people like the Ochs, the Hearsts, the Grahams and, alas, the Murdochs built business models that supported the practice of journalism. But, now the newspaper business model is failing.  The question is whether serious journalism can find a new economic model that will allow it to survive and serve its traditional role in society of separating the real news from the bullshit.  The answer is far from clear.

Part 2 is here.