Chi Trib’s Charles Madigan says let’s hear it for “old media,” which gives us thought-based information.

In the glory days [pre-electronic], reporters could whittle away for five, six, seven hours at an event, parse it out, look for the contradictions and try to present an accurate, compelling account that would be published the next day.

The electronic world has now seized the turf of news immediacy.

Now it’s “breaking news” that carries the day.  But what you see and hear “may not be very well developed.”  Watching and listening,

you might well lose the crucial context or be left with a set of “facts” that are, ultimately, not facts at all, but changeable parts of an ongoing story.

“[T]raditional newspaper family values,” on the other hand, give or try to give the whole story.  But this is an old story.  Long before blogs was radio (which Madigan mentions), where it was “rip ‘n read” for the latest. 

Nor did newspaper people like radio reporters, as the late Len O’Connor recounted in A Reporter in Sweet Chicago (Contemporary, 1983).  He represented something new and threatening, which sounds familiar in today’s context.