There was a yodling cowboy who sold records on TV in the 70s - not, not Boxcar Willie... Slim Whitman, that's it - and he recommended his songs to get you through "these troubled times". Evan Rail, a beer blogging pal who has a real job travel and beer writing including for The New York Times, pointed me to this updated list of ten things journalists need to know to survive in these troubled times including these:

4. Your beat will be online and you will be the community builder. Creating communities and maintaining their attention will increasingly be down to the efforts of individual journalists; you may no longer be able to rely on your employer’s brand to attract reader loyalty in a fickle and rapidly changing online world (see 7).
5. Core journalistic skills are still crucial. You can acquire as many multimedia and programming skills as you want, but if you are unable to tell a story in an accurate and compelling way, no one will want to consume your content.

They make perfect sense and point to a reality - journalism is not a medium, it is a skill and a trade. Used poorly, it gets poor results but that does not impugn or even define the profession. After all, as I have said a zillion times, what do you call a doctor who got "D" in anatomy? Doctor.

It is all very pointy to similar rules related to good blogging but being a public writer on public issues does not a journalist make, even if the courts may misunderstand. There will be a continued need for an interest in objective news reporting and I think the more interesting thing is going to be watching how it manifests itself, not whether the bleeting bloggers, twooters and other on-line amateurs like me are better, especially given that bloggers really haven't achieved all that much despite all the self-congratulations.