Journalism, we are told by journalists, is in a state of crisis. The audience for newspapers and standard television news operations is being fractured by the availability of blogs and other new forms of electronic media. Less of a premium is paid (literally) for the activities of professional journalists who track down their own news stories and more is paid for people who recycle the news others discover or who are more apt to report gossip without it going through the mental filter that a trained professional journalist provides. Full print newspapers, moreover, allow the reader to pick and choose which elaborated story the reader wishes to follow beyond the fold, while the supposed nature of news stories seen on a screen is that they are addressed to the visual, long on illustrations but only a few paragraphs long, and so not containing enough information to satisfy a reader’s need to know—or, worse, become the standard for what readers think they need to know. Journalism is thence reduced to being a headline news service, akin to WINS news radio which proclaims that “twenty two minutes and we give you the world” as well as akin to the news crawl underneath CNN gabfests.

Newspapers are trying to find new business models by selling their web versions of themselves and some blogs are trying to establish themselves as having the professional credibility of professional journalism. There is an attempt, therefore, to make the new electronic media merely a vehicle for the old product rather than allowing the new media to provide for new journalistic forms that alter what journalism is supposed to do. But the attempt to fill old wine into new bottles may not only be hopeless; it may not be a good thing. Headline news services may be a very good thing. That can be seen by noticing the things offered by various forms of journalism rather than how journalists justify what they do to themselves and their readers. Rather than limiting the intellectual and emotional engagement of the reader/viewer, the headline news approach expands the possibilities for the experience of encountering a text by reducing the news story to its essence.

All that most newspaper stories provide are the headlines. If the information an article has is not there before the fold it probably won’t be there at all. The old idea of the inverted pyramid, where the important information is all crowded into the first few paragraphs of an article holds true and, even more than that, sometimes the gist of the story is in the headline or even in the fact that there is a headline which claims such a bit of information. The fact that the U. S. S. Maine had gone down in Havana Harbor was more important than whatever explanation was provided in later paragraphs for what might or might not have caused the explosion. If that is the case, then one does not need newspapers, only headline services, the newspapers serving as journals of opinion or extended feature articles that provide background on breaking news, the way magazines do, even if most of the background pieces that appear in The New York Times news pages really aren’t worth the bother of reading.

A case in point that reveals that it is an antiquated notion that you have to read a newspaper rather what is available on AP or MSNBC home pages, is the coverage by The New York Times, that vehicle for the “full” story, of the even by now hardly remembered Copenhagen Climate Conference, which emerged, as you remember, with no document, only a non-signed statement that all the parties intended to do something or other about controlling the emission of atmospheric pollutants. The television news commentators treated this as Obama’s “save” of a conference that had been doomed to inaction. He had rescued it by coming up with a non-agreement agreement.

Never mind that the media are always out to put the cause of climate control in a good light. Entirely uninvestigated was the announcement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the United States would provide leadership in creating a hundred billion dollar fund to help underdeveloped nations meet their climate challenges if the conference had come up with binding agreements upon the states who had participated in it. No one asked for the paperwork behind this program. How was the money to be raised? What kinds of programs in the underdeveloped world would qualify? How would money that was funneled to African countries not wind up in the pockets of their dictators? All that was reported was the headline, even by The New York Times.

The reason there was nothing else was that, in fact, there was nothing else to report. A surfing of the relevant web sites—that of the Copenhagen Conference, the State Department and even the Sierra Club—revealed nothing but a repeat of the one sentence announcement that had justified the headline. There was no report to be accessed that suggested how the fund would be run or how it would go about its work. The idea of a 100 billion dollar fund was therefore just a throwaway line, something to say to show that the United States cared about the issue. Nothing would have to be done to live up to the promise because it was obvious that the conditions of the challenge would never be met. There would be no agreement at Copenhagen and so there would be no need for a fund for underdeveloped countries.

Now, you do not need any inside sources to take the original announcement of the fund with a grain of salt. The statement of the condition that would activate it was enough to make a reader understand just how speculative the proposal was. I was naïve to think that the State Department would have gotten up the energy to produce a few pages to elaborate nothing and so lend the promise some air of legitimacy. The announcement just fit into the general talk that comes out of Washington. Every agency always has a plan to do something whether in fact it does do planning or not. So all you needed to know was the headline which could accurately mean that if ever a worldwide climate agreement would be signed, some thought would be given as to how best to help out underdeveloped nations which might be drowned out or otherwise impacted by climate change. A sophisticated reader would only need the CNN crawl to know everything that was relevant about the story.

That does not mean that there are not stories about climate change that are worth pursuing. For example, there is the story of the scandal about fudged tables by climate scientists who are more advocates than people who call it as it is rather than as they wish to believe. It is not trivial that the plotting of recent year climate conditions are done with thermometer readings while old time climate conditions are done with tree rings. The more recent readings are probably less reliable because the state of the technology of doing such readings is always changing and one does not know whether some parts of the world are more heavily represented than other parts of the world. Yet The New York Times dismissed a scandal that involved, mind you, senior people at an important research institution, as just a triviality because, so The Times reported, other climate experts said there were other sources of data. When a reader questioned the public editor as to why the story had not been explored in depth, the response by John Tierney, identified as the person who follows climate issues for The Times, was that the paper regularly does updates on the science behind the idea that the climate is warming. Not that I have noticed. So all you know from The Times is that there is a sentiment among educated people that the climate is warming though the evidence provided consists of anecdotes about melting glaciers when the question is whether the weather is changing in the Northeast or on the globe as a whole.

My conclusion from all this is not to damn The Times or take up the cudgel, one more time, for the climate change skeptics. It is to say that the discourse about the matter proceeds on the level of an exchange of clichés, short headlines, and that even fancy newspapers do not deepen the public knowledge. For that you have to go either to professional journals or blogs or the occasional articles in magazines of opinion like The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and it is true enough to say that journalism is largely on the side of those who see climate change in apocalyptic terms, though they always move the goalposts so that there is still time to save the planet if remedial action is taken in five or fifty years. Nobody claims that it is already too late.

I can see a radical redefinition of what we can expect from newspapers and blogs and headline services on the Internet that will suit such a consensus of opinion just fine. Newspapers will be ways to get the feel of what is going on during a particular day. They will not give enough background, however, to help you get through the week. Even Haiti is a three week public phenomenon until people and media decide to focus on something else. Newspapers will dispense sentiment rather than give you the first detailed accounts of immediate relevance about what happened at Gettysburg or at Hiroshima. (The Times gave a rather complete account of that in the weeks following the A-Bomb attack.) The Supreme Court decision overturning corporate and union contributions to political campaigns, on the other hand, was treated for a day or two as a major turning point in how elections will be conducted. You would have thought the case worthy of substantial analysis. But there were few follow-up stories. The “death” of newspapers is therefore just a sentiment of gloom and doom among liberals and a sentiment of glee for unclear reasons among conservatives. Maybe it is just that they don’t like newspapers because they might tell the conservatives something other than what they are already certain is true: that there are death panels; that the stimulus package has not worked at all; that Obama is a radical.

Saying that newspapers do and will continue to deal with the sentiment of the moment, and therefore are able to shed their ponderous size and become headline news services on the Web, defines their portion of the coming division of labor. It does not say who will fill the arena for those who want heavy duty analysis of the issues of the day. Here the Internet is helpful. There are plenty of experts out there who can turn around data in real time or write articles in real time to inform people about what is going on. Blogs organized for that purpose, whether on climate or on educational statistics or on election reform, can be readily enough produced, though the problem is accessing them, knowing where to go, that a problem I leave to Google. Then you will be able to make sense of a Supreme Court decision a day or two after it is issued, scholar-journalists telling you what it says, putting it in the context of past decisions, and spelling out its practical implications. As with most predictions that come true, this one has already come true. SCOTUSblog is a site that does that job. I just have to figure out all the other sites that can help me keep up.