Late one night in July and into the early hours of the next morning Andrew Halcro labored over a lengthy post on his blog andrewhalcro.com.

Earlier that evening he’d spent several hours at the bar of the Sheraton Hotel talking with Alaska State Trooper Mike Wooten.

Wooten, you’ll recall, is the trooper whose divorce from Governor Sarah Palin’s sister Molly and subsequent actions attracted negative attention from some in the state’s executive branch. Now Wooten was telling Halcro that Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan was fired—not for the reasons stated—but for refusing to fire Wooten at the governor’s request. This was more than a month before Palin was tapped by presidential hopeful John McCain as his running mate—a choice that would bring the scrutiny of the national media. But at the time there was no reason to think this would become anything other than a minor scandal in a summer otherwise dominated by ramped up election news.

But Halcro thought he had a story anyway. After spending those hours with Wooten, he spent a few more hours polishing up an article containing those allegations for his blog.

The rest, as they say, is history.

The legislature opted to convene an investigation, and after Palin’s nomination, the firing took on intensely political overtones—complete with competing investigations and stunningly vicious allegations of partisanship.

With some exceptions, it’s tough to say what effect any individual issue or event has when voters go to the polls. But Troopergate certainly tarnished Palin’s reputation as an open, transparent reformer and courageous corruption fighter.

Not bad for one lone guy with nothing more than a keyboard and a website.

So is Andrew Halcro—and bloggers like him—the future of journalism?

I’m not so sure.

To recap, for those of you not glued to the steady stream of news about the news, journalism is undergoing something of a crisis.

In the past newspapers enjoyed some of the highest profit margins of businesses anywhere. Large national chains like Gannett and McClatchy routinely raked in profits of 20 percent and often much higher. Newspapers—as well as television and radio stations—enjoyed a plum position as the main option for local advertisers. Buoyed by such a stable, mature business model, they were able to staff newsrooms and even far-flung bureaus with scores of journalists—hundreds in the case of many large metropolitan papers. With so much journalistic talent around, papers were able to offer readers a wide-angle view of the world, running everything from arts coverage to gobs of international news to deep local beat reporting and news investigations.

Newspapers have always been a staple of democratic societies (see: the First Amendment), but in the thriving, growing America that followed World War II, they became something more: a kind of civic commons, where everyone in a community gathered to read the news and to find out what their fellow citizens thought of it. And they’ve remained enshrined in that place—a respected civic institution (“the fourth estate” they’re sometimes called)—until now.

Newspapers survived the advent of radio and television—even learned to benefit from them in some cases. And they were among the first to understand the importance of the internet.

“Newspapers were anything but late arrivers to the Web party, according to Carlson's Online Timeline and other sources,” writes Slate media critic Jack Shafer in an excellent history of newspapers’ stabs at innovation, posted earlier this week at the Washington Post-owned online magazine. “Among the earliest pure Web newspapers in the United States were the two dueling dailies started in San Francisco during the autumn 1994 press strike—one by union members and one by management.”

But simply understanding the importance of something doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to succeed in it. Once newspapers staked out a web presence, they tended to innovate for the web slowly or not at all. To be fair to newspaper executives, it’s far from certain that sweeping innovations would’ve been their salvation anyway; the internet effectively did away with the costly barriers to entry like printing press, which meant that seemingly overnight pretty much anyone who could afford an internet connection could become a publisher. It didn’t take advertisers long to figure out that they could reach their audiences on the web—often more cheaply and easily than in print or over the airwaves.

And with online-only media proliferating wildly, it’s easier and easier for advertisers to pick and choose their audience.

Say you own a small fashion boutique in Anchorage that specializes in local designers. You could buy an ad in the Anchorage Daily News, which will reach a little more than 70,000 readers of all ages, income levels and interests. Or you could buy an ad on We Are the Disconnect, a local blog devoted exclusively to local fashion. At a fraction of the price. (That scenario is hypothetical; at least for now the blog has no ads.)

Along the way, free classified services like Craigslist took big bites out of another lucrative traditional revenue stream, even as costs like newsprint and fuel for delivery have soared.

All of which brings us to today. Even though newspapers’ online readerships are growing fast enough to offset steady losses in print readers, the same hasn’t been true of online advertising revenue. (In fact, last quarter, for the first time, a few national media companies reported dips in online revenue.) To maintain the high profits that investors and stockholders expect from newspapers, companies that own them have been forced to make repeated cuts. Physical papers have shrunk in size and page count. But more worrisome still are job cuts. The Anchorage Daily News alone has experienced two rounds of layoffs, just in the last half of 2008. And the stock of their parent company McClatchy continues to suffer. Almost no one in the industry believes that newsrooms will be growing again in the foreseeable future.

Stories bemoaning this trend have cropped up with increasing frequency in newspapers around the country. Is all this just a bunch of navel-gazing by reporters who worry about their own future? After all, while the travails of big economic drivers like auto manufacturers and investment banks get lots of coverage, industries on the more modest scales typical of media companies tend to rise and fall below the radar.

There’s one critical distinction, though, between news and other businesses. While they’re in the business of making a profit, newspapers also serve another function—serving as the primary source of news and information about their communities. If troubles on the business end render papers unable to do that job, or to do it as thoroughly as they used to, what happens next?

The natural, logical place to look for this is the very institutions that are replacing portions of the newspaper business model—blogs, and other DIY social media like Facebook or YouTube.

So it’s no surprise that the blogoshpere continues to pop up in these discussions as a replacement for traditional newsgathering operations—especially from those who write for it.

But is it?

In last week’s column I cited a Wall Street Journal column by Newark Star-Ledger opinion write Paul Mulshine taking down this notion. Since Mulshine’s article came out it’s been subject to a lot of criticism from proponents of online media. Much of it is fair—Mulshine allowed himself to drift a bit between the roles of traditional reporting and informed opinion—but much of it also skirts what I believe is his central point:

“The old model for compensating journalists is as obsolete as the telegraph. If anyone out there in the blogosphere can tell me what the new model is, I will pronounce him the first genius I've ever encountered on the Internet.”

I omitted a much longer portion of his argument there, due to space constraints, but I’ll repeat it here:

“‘When enough bloggers take the leap, and start reporting on the statehouse, city council, courts, etc. firsthand, full-time, then the Big Media will take notice and the avalanche will begin,’ Mr. Reynolds (Glenn Reynolds, who blogs at Instapundit) quotes another blogger as saying. If this avalanche ever occurs, a lot of bloggers will be found gasping for breath under piles of pure ennui. There is nothing more tedious than a public meeting.

“After I got out of Rutgers, I began as a reporter at a newspaper in Ocean County, N.J. If the Toms River Regional Board of Education had not offered free coffee, I fear that I might have been found the next day curled up on the floor in the back of the room like Rip Van Winkle. As it was, I only made it through the endless stream of resolutions and speeches by employing trance-inducing techniques learned in my youth during religion class at St. Joseph's school up the street.

“The common thread here, whether the subject is foreign, national or local, is that the writer in question is performing a valuable task for the reader—one that no sane man would perform for free (emphasis added). He is assembling what in the business world is termed the "executive summary." Anyone can duplicate a long and tedious report. And anyone can highlight one passage from that report and either praise or denounce it. But it takes both talent and willpower to analyze the report in its entirety and put it in a context comprehensible to the casual reader.”

Say what you will about Mulshine’s disdain for the citizen journalist’s ability to write informed opinion, but I still think he has a point when it comes to traditional news reporting.

Perhaps this comes from my own experiences covering boring meetings.

Public meetings certainly aren’t the only places to do journalism, of course, but they’re an important part of beat reporting, which in turn is the bedrock of community journalism.

Here’s an example: At a former paper where I covered a large urban school district, I was assigned to attend an obscure school board committee meeting that was rescheduled for 7:45 in the morning in a small side conference room. No one from any other media outlet showed, but trip turned out to be worth it: The committee was discussing a plan to close several inner-city schools and send students elsewhere. The resulting story spawned a wave of protests from affected communities and in time reshaped the way the district planned it’s school closures. But if I hadn’t been paid to cover that meeting, you can bet I would’ve slept in that morning. Would an unpaid citizen journalist have done the same? I’m not sure.

True, a minor school board controversy isn’t a huge journalistic coup. But consider a story that’s arguably the greatest in American journalism’s history: Watergate.

The Washington Post didn’t break the story of illegal wiretaps because they’d sent a crack team of investigative journalists out looking for it (in fact, as anyone who’s read or seen All the President’s Men will recall, the superstars on Ben Bradlee’s National desk repeatedly said there was no story there). Instead they got the scoop because they sent a beat cop reporter to an arraignment of a few seemingly unimportant burglars—and kept asking questions.

What if Woodward and Bernstein had simply typed up a brief on the burglary based on the police report and moved on to other things because low staffing levels meant they didn’t have time to go to the arraignment? It’s not hard to imagine such a scenario happening at a major newspaper today.

This was the gist of my column—that a community without professional reporters (or at least a critical mass of professional reporters) is in danger of becoming a community that can’t hold its political and business establishments accountable. And quoting Mulshine, I despaired that blogs would prove to be sufficient replacements for traditional newsrooms.

The column got two very different reactions. Linda Kellen Biegel, who writes the Blue Oasis blog under the pen name Celtic Diva, roundly excoriated me for “blog-bashing” and imputed that to my supposed concerns about job security. I’m not sure where Kellen Biegel got the notion that I blamed blogs for the decline of newspapers (in my mind blogs and the internet aren’t synonymous), or that my job editing the Press is in jeopardy, but that misses the point, too. I think I can speak for most journalists in saying that short term worries about job security pale compared to longer-term worries about who will hold powerful people accountable if the collapse of traditional news media takes traditional newsrooms down with it. And while a few among the older generations of reporters and editors may be nostalgic for newsprint, most of us wouldn’t miss it nearly as much as the information that comes printed on it.

Kellen Biegel goes on to assert that blogs broke “most of the major stories about Sarah Palin this year” but then goes on to offer only Halcro’s Troopergate scoop as an example. Nothing would make me happier than to believe that she’s correct. A decentralized media with tons of participants that provided aggressive watchdog coverage of government and other important institutions is an appealing idea indeed. But for every great post by Halcro, or Alaska Dispatch or Alaska Report (whose author Dennis Zaki might go to more public meetings and events than any other reporter in town), there are scads of bloggers whose main function is to amplify their opinions by linking to those of other bloggers they agree with.

A much more thoughtful post comes from the anonymous blogger over at Mudflats. The title “I’m Not Going to Be a Journalist, and You Can’t Make Me. (Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That)” pretty much sums it up, but here’s an excerpt anyway:

“It’s also mistaken, I think, to suggest that there are ‘a dozen other bloggers who’d rather pick a fight than pick up a phone and do some actual reporting’ is looking at this the wrong way. Are bloggers, and should they be, considered journalists? Again, some bloggers ARE journalists. Most are not. If they were, journalists might be in worse trouble than they are now because that would mean there were a lot of people doing their job for free.

“I can only speak for myself, but here goes. I am not a journalist. I don’t want to be one, and I’m glad I’m not.”

Mudflats is correct to point out that there’s an overwhelming diversity of blogs out there, from Andrew Halcro’s to We Are the Disconnect, and it’s silly to lump them all together into one category, or expect them all to want to practice journalism. It’s a little disheartening, though, that a few more aren’t trying, or succeeding at what Halcro did with the Troopergate story.

We’d all be better off if they did.

And until they do, complaints from bloggers that the mainstream media isn’t doing its job well enough—especially when what they often mean is that they’re not reflecting the writer’s opinion well enough—are going to keep ringing hollow.

I’m optimistic that in the long run some combination of news sources will eventually emerge that will allow the public to stay informed—perhaps smaller but more numerous traditional papers coupled with a more robust collection of online sources doing original reporting.

Until that emerges, though, let’s pray that the aging giants like the ADN can hold on to enough reporters to keep the public informed and the powerful accountable in the short run.

krestia.degeorge@anchoragepress.com