The idea of saving the media is never going to get a bad press. This morning I went to an interesting New America Foundation conference entitled “Who Pays for the News?” The event was well attended, mostly by nervous looking journos uncertain about their futures. There was an almost palpable sense of goodwill toward the keynote speaker, Senator Benjamin L. Cardin (D-MD), sponsor of the Newspaper Revitalization Act, which aims to facilitate the transfer of struggling media organs into non-profit, 501(c)(3) status. A long panel discussion about the existential crisis of modern journalism followed.

Obviously, nobody claimed to have cracked the future-of-media code: there is no answer … yet.

But Sen. Cardin’s ideas have merit. The non-profit model already works for a number of print, television, and radio organs, and his bill may help keep local reportage alive in years to come. The larger question — whither the free press in the age of the Internet? — remains, though.

Among the audience, there was arguably too much high-minded cant about the important civic function of journalism, and the need to preserve that good. This is something that Americans take more seriously than others. And perhaps rightly: we should all be concerned about the demise of quality reporting — investigative, political, scientific, or other — in a mass democracy.

Everybody should admit, however, that journalism has long been something other than (maybe even opposite to) democracy’s watchdog. In some ways, then, the web-hastened decline of the establishment media is, as The Atlantic‘s editor James Bennet suggested, welcome. Newspapers and newsmen might soon revisit that golden-age of pre-war hackery, a time in which the journos were less upper-middle class, less comfortable with the political and social elite, and more instinctively antagonistic toward authority. “Scrappier,” as Bennet put it. All to the good.

But what of the Internet? Nobody can say. Among the panelists, the talk at times drifted into gabble about the limitless possibilities of the new media age: “platforms,” “inter-active conversations,” “network inter-facing,” and so on. Putting aside its woolly terminology, this stuff is important and portentous. The many-headed hydra of information, knowledge, and power is mutating at incomprehensible and discombobulating speeds. We simply don’t know what’s happening, or what the news beast will look like in, say, ten years.

For now, however, journalists are best advised to be honest. (Something that doesn’t come naturally.) We should concede that our trade does not possess an inherent nobility; indeed, some of the finest journalism is willfully perverse, biased, and mean-minded. Moreover, the idea that the structure of the newspaper business serves to guarantee quality copy — as opposed to the unwashed blogging masses — is not necessarily true. Often the opposite is the case. Some very bad writers reach the top of their profession, some of the best wallow at the bottom. Technophiles will tell you that the Internet revolution is on the verge of changing that, though so far it has spectacularly failed to do so. (Blogs, for example, have their merits. But we all know that blogging has tended to encourage ill-founded opinions, self-importance, and vanity at every level. Perhaps we should all give it up?)

Whatever the future holds, it’s still too early to write journalism’s obituary. But we hacks might need some assistance along the way. Why not help TAC out with a donation today?