But that’s not bad news for TV news—or, at any rate, it doesn’t have to be. Back to what TV does well: providing context, humanizing the news, expanding news stories past their text and into the realm of the communal. So, TV news executives, producers, reporters: Take advantage of all that. Play to your strengths. In your case, be to the Web what magazines have been to newspapers. Take ’Net-based reporting to the next level. Do even more of what you do now: Serve as a platform for people in the news—politicians, businesspeople, anyone—to have their say. Interview them. Dig deep. Provide context to their stories. Invite experts—with an emphasis on academics and intellectuals, and a decided de-emphasis on partisan spokespeople (and—dare I dream?—a ban on “body language experts” of any kind)—to provide context and criticism. Run segments of explanatory journalism pegged to the news of the day. Curate that news. Analyze. Provide context. Think. Stop thinking of TV news as a kind of visual version of a reported blog, and consider it instead more as a visual version of a magazine of ideas. (Or, at least, of a newsmagazine.) Treat here’s-what’s-happening-right-now news summaries not as the end point of a broadcast, but as the foundation.

In liberating themselves from the caprices of the breaking news cycle, a new generation of newcasts can capitalize on the opportunity TV offers for community-building. Their resources and their air time freed from the constraints of breaking news, broadcasts will have the opportunity instead to focus, for example, on assembling panels of expert guests and on preparing questions for those guests that will lead to lively conversation—and they can enjoy the luxury of having those panel discussions last longer than five minutes. They can invest in the newsmagazine-style segments of reporting and criticism—mini-documentaries, even—that audiences both like and need. (For evidence of both, see the surge in ratings that 60 Minutes has enjoyed for the past two weeks.) They can, overall, serve as a kind of national town hall, in which leaders—political and intellectual and cultural—come together to talk to their constituents. What these newscasts would lack in terms of the Web’s democratic give-and-take, they’d be well positioned to compensate for in providing smart curation, and analysis of, the major stories of the day.

But wait, you may say. When it comes down to it, aren’t you really arguing for more punditry on TV news? And, well, yes. But advocating more punditry need not, on its own, be journalistic heresy. Because what I’d like to see, specifically, is a kind of PBS-ified punditry: smart, thoughtful, valuable analysis that contextualizes the news. That even—hey, let’s go crazy here—has fun with the news. More news analysis need not, after all, mean less news; more punditry need not mean less reporting. I’m simply arguing for an efficient and intelligent allocation of resources. I have confidence that newspapers and their descendants will continue to develop the mechanisms and the models that will produce, in the aggregate, more reporting—and quality reporting, at that. The citizenry of our digitized future, largely via the Web, will be more informed about our world, not less. But TV shouldn’t cede all reporting to other outlets—again, I’d hope that freedom from the vagaries of the split-second news cycle would leave more reportorial resources for enterprise work—rather, simply the snippet-style reporting required to regurgitate breaking-news stories from the Web.

Nor am I arguing for the blanket PBS-ification of all TV news. Because, first, well, snooze. (Blanket-anything is rarely a good idea, not only because uniformity is unproductive, but also because it’s boring.) And also: networks, obviously, are and should be free to develop their own individual voices. If that inches some closer to the NewsHour and others closer to Inside Edition, well, so be it. But I am saying that much of TV news right now, in its mix of breaking alerts and half-hearted analysis, is somewhat akin to daily helpings of broccoli with Cheez-Whiz, the healthy stuff made more palatable to audiences by virtue of its blanket of neon-tastic ooze. And since the Web already serves up broccoli (rendered, to belabor the metaphor, both tastier and more nutritious to consumers because of the Web’s freshness-assuring packaging), TV news might as well focus on the tasty stuff. And given a choice between Cheez-Whiz and, say—sorry, last metaphor-belaborment—a nice, aged, melted Gouda…wouldn’t most of us prefer the latter?

In other, non-metaphorical, words: Punditry need not be a bad thing. Smart need not equal boring. There’s a way to marry reflective, thoughtful journalism with the personality-driven setup that the modern TV Zeitgeist seems to require. Take, for example, shows like Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. They’re partisan, sure—nakedly so—but ideology, I’d say, is subsidiary to their success. Because in them, overall, you have two informative, entertaining, and smart shows that offer a deliberative and often quite delightful mix of reporting, analysis, criticism, and commentary. Their guests are almost always true experts about a given topic—no “body language experts” in sight—and the hosts are smart enough both to ask good questions and to know how to follow up on them. (Maddow’s October interview with Obama, for example—which focused on wonky details like infrastructure improvement—was perhaps one of the best I’ve seen with the then-candidate.) Watch each show—or even part of each show—and a viewer will come away not only with knowledge of the biggest news stories of the day, but also with a relatively sophisticated sense of why those stories matter. And of how they fit into the greater context of the world.