Media must insist on being accurate

In the past few days it's been my pleasure to speak to several college classes of extremely bright communications students.

Some of them plan to go into public relations when they graduate.

Some seek a career in television.

But a surprising, and heartening, number plan to try their luck with print newspapers, despite gloomy questioning by some outsiders as to whether the print newspaper is an endangered species.

The answer to that question, of course, is that newspapers that adapt to changing circumstances and media culture are going to be with us for the foreseeable future. If that is not the case, then the savvy media folks who just spent many millions of dollars to buy up papers like the Knight Ridder group, and the smart investors currently offering large sums for such a flagship paper as the Los Angeles Times, are in for a horrendous surprise.

True, the circulation of some newspapers is down. So is advertising linage. To cut costs, some newspapers have laid off staff.

But there have been peaks and valleys in the newspaper business before, as well as dire predictions about their longevity. With the advent of commercial radio, some pessimists declared that the demise of newspapers could not be far off. They proved wrong. With the arrival of television, first in black and white and then in color, the naysayers again predicted the doom of newspapers. They again proved wrong.

Now we have the Internet. It is true that for many, a new generation of information consumers, the Internet is their first choice of provider.

But there are a couple of factors to remember.

First, there is no news on the Internet without a news organization, usually a newspaper, to provide it. Over time, the means of delivery may change. But we will still need reporters to go out and gather information, photographers to illustrate it, artists to make supporting charts and graphics to help explain it, and editors who are the gatekeepers to ensure that content is accurate, relevant and meets community standards of taste.

Second, any weirdo or conspiracy theorist can get on the Internet and offer his or her version of "factual" news. As Bob Seidensticker, an MIT graduate and lifelong veteran of the computer business and Microsoft, writes in his new book, "Future Hype," "The Internet is a gateway to a flood of information, but it's a flood of decreasing reliability. ... When we let a thousand flowers bloom, we get many dandelions."