Journalists like to be tellers—not subjects—of the story. Maybe that’s why one of the most abrupt and startling changes of our era, one with potentially enormous social implications, gets relatively little ink: the collapse of the economic model that made my career possible.

This is not a pity party for people who push pencils for a living. It’s a message to anyone who has ever picked up a newspaper and read a story that moved you, entertained you, or—more important—gave you the information to perform your job, take care of your family, and be an educated citizen.

For most of my three decades in the news business, that kind of information has been widely available on a daily basis for a relative pittance. If memory serves, it cost 35 cents to buy a copy of the first newspaper that hired me. These days, the daily price tends to be a dollar.

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Those two bits you’ve been stuffing into newspaper coin boxes have never come close to paying the salaries of the reporters, photographers, and editors who provided what we like to call “the daily miracle.” Advertisers did. Advertisers who, in the Internet era of cookies and microtargeting, have vanished from print.

According to the American Press Institute, newspaper revenues dropped from $59 billion in 2000 to $38 billion in 2009. Classified advertising, the lifeblood of most local papers, sank from $21.4 billion to $6.2 billion. Thank you, Craigslist. Hence the paradox of the Information Age: At a time when people are consuming more news in more ways than ever, fewer people appear to be reporting it. The number of people on the nation’s newspaper rosters was 54,700 in 1997. Today, the count is 41,500.

I can hear the hoots of the Internet evangelists: I’m not taking into account the new media. News has been democratized. Every citizen is a journalist now, and every big story can be crowd-sourced. Let a billion bloggers bloom. Who needs professional journalists—a term that some might argue is an oxymoron—anyway?

This month, as Americans marked the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, we acknowledged not only the history of the civil-rights movement but also the fact that putting that story in front of us every day was one of the signal achievements of the much-maligned mainstream media. In their 2007 book, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff demonstrate how closely the civil-rights struggle’s success was intertwined with media attention.

What, after all, made America change its mind after nearly 200 years of accepting slavery and its successor, Jim Crow? This was not, as in South Africa, a matter of a long-oppressed majority population finally asserting its rights. This was a minority demanding and achieving justice because of reporters’ relentless and often courageous coverage of its grievances. At a time when just three television networks were on the air and your town had only one or two newspapers, the civil-rights stories became pretty hard to avoid.

Would the same gradual but inexorable revolution be possible today? Or would truly dedicated segregationists just flip over to their local KKK blog for all the news they wanted—and only the news they wanted?

The new technology for news delivery makes it possible for us to broaden our horizons in ways that were utterly unimaginable just a few years ago: I can listen to a radio broadcast from Paris live on my mobile phone. After Osama bin Laden’s death, my Arab-speaking colleagues were able to read real-time reactions in the Middle East on websites and blogs.

But that technology also makes it all too easy to put on blinders. If you so choose, you can read news only for, by, and about vegan yoga practitioners. Or, more ominous, news for, by, and about Barack Obama haters who are convinced that the president is constitutionally illegitimate because he was born in Kenya. Or Sarah Palin haters who believe that the ex-Alaska governor banned children’s classics from her state’s libraries.

FactCheck.org, funded by the Annenberg Foundation, has debunked these and scores of other urban myths perpetuated on the Internet. Executive Director Brooks Jackson has told journalism classes of mine that his organization does the same sort of work that newspapers used to do but don’t have the staff to sustain anymore.

Who is going to pay, and who is going to pay attention? Those are the questions confronting newsrooms as we dust ourselves off from the collapse of the old economic model that sustained us and try to come up with a new one. It’s not just a question for journalists, though. As publications ask readers to pay for more of the actual cost of producing a professional news report (something subscribers to this publication already do), news consumers have to ask themselves what kind of reporting they are willing to support—with their dollars and their eyeballs.

At a time when every upstart news organization seems to want to distinguish itself with opinion, it’s become fashionable to diss journalistic dispassion and detachment. Yes, “objectivity” is a literary pose, but the coverage of the civil-rights movement, brought to our attention largely by white reporters and editors doing their professional duty to see the other side of the story, proves its value.

Technology has given us a brave new world of media choices. It’s up to us to make them good ones.

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This article appeared in the Saturday, May 21, 2011 edition of National Journal.

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