That’s not a distinction that should be easily pushed aside. I just read another interesting treatise from Owen Good over at Kotaku.com, a video-game blog. Consider the source, you may say, but let the man’s words stand on their own:

I feel keenly the distress of the [Rocky Mountain] News’ editorial staff; I’m out of work, and few have harsher words for ownership and executives when their lack of vision, their quarter-to-quarter myopia or their fear cost working people their jobs. Over the News’ decline you’ve seen all three in play. But I wish journalists would face up to the fact that the newspaper industry in its present form is not sustainable, and quit writing so many hand-wringing odes to it, which seem only to chastise an already disaffected readership that views journalism’s public service as more message than mission.

…

Now, the writers and the photographers and the line editors are the only ones left to make the pitch. Instead, they’re lecturing a constituency whose maximum possible contribution would be a daily 50 cent purchase. It’s like trying to get to the moon with a bake sale.

The reality, and he’s right on this, is that print journalism is dead.  But all the harsh words Owen reserves for the journalism business should be directed solely at the print side of operations. Defending the future of daily journalism and print newspapers is perhaps an untenable position because we don’t live in a society that works on a day-to-day schedule. The sun is always setting and rising across this planet so the mission never ends. Journalism has become a second-to-second game — a game for which print is a horribly outdated medium.

The “quarter-to-quarter myopia” accelerated the demise of the newspaper business, but it didn’t ensure it. The growth of telecommunications and the Internet–coupled with the thirst for constant information that makes the news business possible in the first place–was what did it in. But that doesn’t mean we should continue that short-sightedness and associate the death of our newspapers with the death of our journalism — or the death of our need for it.

I won’t go on and on about the mission or the need for journalists in this world, but I won’t say that the game will be any different or the journalism any less effective solely for the reason that the words get sent online and not on trucks. I don’t think Owen feels quite that way, especially since he writes for a blog, but I don’t think we should turn a deaf ear to those who don’t exactly look at blogs and most web-only operations and see an Eden of journalistic integrity.

The sports media world has already begun to figure how to survive in this electronic age to some degree and the transition from a primarily print-oriented world to one where sites like Yahoo Sports, ESPN, and Fox Sports dominate the national news coverage in ways that USA Today, the NY Times, and LA Times never really could has been smooth.

Maybe it’s because sports retain such a provincial nature in their fandom in ways other beats don’t, but I don’t exactly look at the future of this business and see too wild a change. The difference between good journalism and bad journalism has never been what the words are printed on, but the ideals and integrity of the person writing them. There are a lot of people who hold themselves to an extremely high journalistic standard–people far too talented to not find someone to pay for them to cover the news.

While they may be the people most loudly lamenting the state of the news business, they’re also the same people that are going to wake up in 15 years, drive to work and find themselves in something eerily similar to our newsrooms now–just maybe without the 50 trucks and the warehouse-sized press in the back room.

Like I said, the sun’s always rising somewhere.