Comfort for newspaperwomen (and men) everywhere

I do so love the New York Times' Talk to the Newsroom feature.

I was reading old installments when I stumbled across this lovely answer from executive editor Bill Keller. He's trying a little too hard to be funny, but in an industry that is widely expected to die within 50 years, Keller's conviction that we'll all have jobs in the future is comforting:

The Future of Newsprint

Q. Will the New York Times have a paper edition in fifty years, or will it likely be entirely Web-based and digital by that time?

-- David Myers, San Jose, Calif.

A. Fifty years into the future? That's the province of novelists, not editors. (Neal Stephenson! William Gibson! White courtesy teleport, please!) Will readers carry portable electronic tablets containing the Sunday NYT? Will we have foldable sheets of composite material that broadcast the news in electronic ink? Will we get our news beamed to us through cerebral implants? And will there be cults of newsprint enthusiasts who pay a premium for the retro pleasure of ink on paper, the way some audiophiles today insist on vinyl records? Heck, I don't know.

Will there be a New York Times, a Wall Street Journal, a Washington Post? Yes, I'm pretty sure there will be, or something very much like them, regardless of the medium in which they are distributed. What makes a newspaper is not the paper. It's resources and values. It's reporters and editors. It's the difficult and expensive and sometimes dangerous business of deploying talented people to witness events, ferret out information wherever it is buried, and try to make sense of it. It's a rigorous set of standards, enforced by experienced editors.

There is a hunger -- a market -- for trustworthy information about the world we live in, information that is tested, investigated, sorted, organized, analyzed and presented in a digestible form. Some people want it because it is essential to the way they make a living. (Out of touch means out of business.) Some want it because they regard being well-informed as a condition of good citizenship. Some want it so they can get the jokes on the Daily Show. I can't foresee such a drastic dumbing-down of civilization that the demand for good journalism goes away. And I don't know who else will provide it. Blogs? I love 'em, the best of them help keep us honest, but most of them don't do actual reporting. They riff on the news. Big Internet companies? Their business model is scale, awesome scale, not the kind of craftsmanship that goes into the best newspapers.

Barring new developments in organ regeneration (see today's Science Times), I don't expect to be around in 50 years. But we will be.

Of course, he does work for the effing Newspaper of Record. The rest of us might have more to worry about.