The example I always return to, because I think it’s so emblematic and so crazy, is Alisara Chirapongse, who I’ve written about in Here Comes Everybody. She was blogging under the name gnarlykitty, and she was a fashion-obsessed college student in Bangkok. And so she was blogging about cute shoes and going out dancing, and then there was a coup in Thailand. And so she started blogging about the coup. And Thailand shut down the regular media, but they didn’t shut down Web logs. So she took her little camera out, she took a picture of tanks in front of a government building, and it was one of the first pictures to come out of Thailand during the coup. And so, all of a sudden, she’s committed an act of journalism.

And then a couple of days later she starts blogging about this Hello Kitty phone she’s got, and all the commenters who had come in to read her work were like “No, no, no! Get back to the coup!” And she posted this wonderful post. She said, “Look, this is my blog. This is about things that are happening in my life. One of the things happened in my life is that there has been a coup in my country, but another thing is I just got this new phone! And if you don’t like it, don’t read it.” And there was zero sense of obligation to her audience or journalistic mission or anything. And yet, she was, in those days, one of the earliest producers of real news and information inside post-coup Thailand. So if journalism is going from being a profession to an acitivity, then it all goes on a spectrum. There will be professional journalists, there will be journalists who practice journalism all day long for their jobs. And there’s going to be people like Chirapongse, for whom a single act of journalism may just define how they participate. But at that moment it’s pretty critical. So, I think news organizations are going to have a much harder time making a distinction between what it is they do.

You know, I talked to somebody from—oh, I forget where… actually, it may have been from CJR—for whom the Wall Street Journal was a serious media outlet. And when I pointed out that they run fluff pieces and they run a weekend piece, she kind of wrote that off as if once you’re inside the wall of, you know, the journalistic citadel, it kind of doesn’t matter that you’re doing stuff as fluffy as the average Web blogger. But those distinctions don’t make any sense on the network. And so people will always be interested in information relevant to their current situation. The part of that that’s really hard journalism, like covering the city council or whatever, where it’s long and it’s boring but you got to do it, is going to increasingly have to find new business models, because we can’t just rely on Bloomingdale’s to subsidize that anymore with display ads. And so we’re going to have this move to what I think are going to be a lot more nonprofit models for news, a la NPR. But, much more importantly, the idea that there are news organizations and other kinds of organizations, I think, is just going to break down under the weight of the evidence.

RJ: So are you at all afraid of, you know, a scenario where there’s not as much “serious journalism” going on? Or is that just something that’s a crazy idea?

CS: No, I don’t think it’s a crazy idea at all. When you talk about nightmare scenarios, here’s my nightmare: that for the print journalists, in particular—there’s a great Hemingway quote, I forget who it’s about: “He lost his money the usual way: slowly and then all at once”—that this is the all-at-once year. Right? That for four, maybe five, of the last few years, print ad revenues have been in moderate but monotonic decline. And so everybody’s been sitting around waiting around for it to reverse, and then glumly realizing it won’t reverse. And then wondering how long they have. And then, suddenly, we get this financial meltdown. So my nightmare is that every city with less than a quarter of a million people in it sees its only daily newspaper vanish. And that a good portion of those cities turn to 1950s-style, you know, 1950s New Orleans-style corruption. Which is to say because there’s no one watching, no one will be held accountable. So L.A. will be fine. Chicago will be fine, New York will be fine. You know, you can imagine Wichita just getting hijacked by its own city council. And it will take some time, as it took some time during the print journalism days to move from yellow journalism into some idea of serious reporting that isn’t beholden enough to the powers that be to be swayed. I don’t think that this is an easy transition at all.