WASHINGTON — They like us. They really like us. Just don't expect them to help us invent the future.
A string of U.S. senators delivered so many lofty odes to the American newspaper at a "Future of Journalism" hearing this week, it almost made me blush.
When a Republican senator suggests you're something like a bulwark of democracy, you've got to smile.
But that doesn't mean newspapers command a winning majority around here. Not even in good times and especially not now, when the government has a few other items atop its agenda, like economic turmoil, dysfunctional healthcare and Islamic extremism.
So senators and a panel of experts mulled antitrust exemptions and nonprofit status for newspapers, but Wednesday's three-hour session had all the urgency of a confirmation hearing for postmaster general.
That left plenty of time for the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet to take testimony from a panel of experts, who brimmed with New Media triumphalism, Old Media hand-wringing and hopes for an old-new "hybrid" that will be the future of news.
I don't know which was scarier: hearing from Dallas Morning News Publisher James M. Moroney that his paper gets as little as 40 cents for 1,000 views of an ad on the paper's website, or listening as Arianna Huffington crooned in mesmerizing Greek English that "seetazooon joornolusts" (that's "citizen journalists") will make it all better.
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) called the hearing because he sees newspapers as an "endangered species," one that has traditionally provided the vast bulk of investigative and public interest reporting.
Kerry and several other senators, particularly Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), said they saw websites and amateur reporters providing information, but not of the quantity or quality of old line news organizations.
(McCaskill reported that, even as she sat in the hearing, she BlackBerryed in a rebuttal to a false blog report about her on a St. Louis website.)
Huffington told the senators and newspaper folk they should stop clinging to the past and submit to an emerging "pro-am model," in which amateur reporters get guidance from professional journalists and editors.
She noted that the website Talking Points Memo relied in part on citizens to discern a pattern, when the Bush Justice Department dumped U.S. attorneys who would not toe its political line.
