I agree with you that we need more in journalism than columnists. If that didn’t come across clearly in my piece, I missed the mark. Reporting is the foundation of journalism, no question, and newspapers are the birthplace of reporting.

My point of leading with Ben McGrath’s New Yorker piece wasn’t to discredit his story. Pieces like that have their place in journalism, and that specific story is full of worth (it’s in the New Yorker, ’nuff said). I just thought it was a great example of the traditional print voice that is seeping online.

To me, the internet is a platform shrouded in a cloud of ? No one quite knows how to tame this beast yet, and they sure as hell don’t know how to make money off of it. But just because sites/publications aren’t sure how to make capital, does it mean they are allowed to be uncreative in their content? Is it a free license to shake out the pages of their magazines onto their keyboards?

I agree with you–good writing is good writing. But the problem with journalism isn’t a lack of good work, it’s how it will be presented. Why not figure out a new voice for the new medium that is the internet, learn how to monetize that beast, and then take that money to fund print once more?

Print reporting shouldn’t go away, and it doesn’t need to change (although I could do without some of Reilly’s autopilot puns), editors just need to know its place, and businessmen need to figure out how to keep it there.