The ability to question, to be skeptical, now logically includes using the audience as a skeptical sounding board for the press. But it also means the audience themselves need to keep an open mind and not say, ‘Well I like this guy, I like President Obama, and therefore I believe him’ …

It’s incumbent on all of us to say, ‘Okay I like you—now show me the evidence behind what you are saying.”

As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, I would hope that we all recognize that the people we like and the people we dislike in public life are capable of spin and shading the truth and exploiting statistics, and engaging in argument rather than explanation of things.

One thing you offered in the book was the origin of the phrase, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” I thought it was one of these things people just repeated without ever knowing its source. But you folks identify the source as being a news organization in Chicago.

Yeah, the Chicago News Service [sic], which was a place where a variety of prominent folks trained. One of the things that’s interesting is that kind of classic and very formalized apprenticeship system has broken down. CNS was, in the mid-twentieth-century, a place where kids could get entry level jobs and be taught by the iconic scary city news editor who would terrify them into learning the discipline of verification, not that anybody used such polysyllabic words to describe it … (Editor’s note, 10/11/11: The organization was actually called the City News Bureau.)

The point you mention about the erosion of the apprenticeship is interesting. On the one hand, internships at big magazines often go to people who are well connected or from wealthy families because they are unpaid, and it therefore creates a specific class of person who is able to do these internships. On the other hand, when we had these larger systems where you would pass through—for example, if you wanted to be a newspaper reporter you would start at a community weekly and move up and up—with the erosion of those systems there are definitely some drawbacks; but now there is also room for different kinds of thinking because not everyone passes through the same system. Is there that other side of it?

Like any phenomenon that we encounter it has its wonderfully, powerfully positive aspects and its drawbacks. One thing is that a new, better journalism will be invented because there are so many more tools for conveying information on a digital platform. If you had people who had only been classically trained in the old narratives, there would be a tilt more towards old narratives, old voices, old storytelling types like inverted pyramid …

The new storytelling techniques that may be graphical and not even text will come from people who understand the way the next generation processes information. You also have the advantage of many more editors; if news is a colloquy between the newsgatherers and the audience, and if the press is engaged with its audience and listening to its audience, the knowledge about what things mean should advance more quickly.

Conventional journalism, we know from two generations of research, is too focused on the horserace, on inside baseball and power politics, and loses sight of what will this actually mean to citizens, what will this cost, is it working in the real world? …

At least at the moment in the year 2010, the new ecosystem for news hasn’t come close to making up for what’s been lost in these traditional newsrooms. We can point hopefully to a neighborhood blog here or a small website that’s developing in this community, or to that community website, and that’s wonderful; but in volume … we’ve lost more than we’ve regained.

Is there a necessity to lose in order to move on? Is there a relationship between those two things?

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Craig Silverman is the editor of RegretTheError.com and the author of Regret The Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech. He is also the editorial director of OpenFile.ca and a columnist for the Toronto Star.