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I blame these three factors: the Internet; newspapers, for not acting responsibly and instead cheapening their product; and educational institutions. Schools do not teach kids how to use the Net responsibly. Kids need to be shown how to make it a useful resource rather than a source of disinformation and gossip.

What will the end result be of a nation of narrow thinkers? I do not know. We'll find out soon enough, and I suspect it won't be a good.

Thanks to the Internet, up-to-the-second world and local info has become a commodity, just like tap water. But online media, with its much lower ad revenue and few established subscription fees, doesn't yet support labor-intensive professional news gathering. This is the papers' traditional strength, epitomized by giants such as the recently deceased R.W. Apple, who in his day served as a New York Times (NYSE:NYT) bureau chief in Lagos, Nairobi, Saigon, Moscow, London, and Washington: authoritative analysis, in-depth reporting, diverse local coverage, and actual boots on the ground around the world.

Perversely, the market is weakening newspapers' core competency before new media can replace it. So far this decade, the industry has lost about 2,800 full-time editorial jobs, estimate the Poynter Institute and the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Buyout packages target the old-growth trees of the newsroom, the senior editors with experience and irreplaceable institutional memory. Deep reportage dwindles. The Boston Globe just closed its three remaining foreign bureaus.

For my money, the best example of journalism as social enterprise is NPR, which is having a hell of a decade. Gone are the days of full dependence on mingy government stipends. Since CEO Ken Stern came on board (as COO) in 1999, revenues from corporate sponsors have more than doubled, as has weekly listenership. NPR is hiring more reporters, opening new international bureaus, and has helped pioneer podcasting.

For younger news junkies like me, reared on participatory online media, what makes the public-radio model most appealing is its acknowledged reliance on "people like you." Listener support empowers it to strive to be a primary source of quality news, something no one else in American radio is even attempting in the age of Clear Channel (NYSE:CCU). Stern acknowledges that listener trust provides the "halo effect" that motivates corporate sponsors. "I think truthfully there is a huge advantage to not being bottom-line driven, especially in a cramped media space where everybody's under revenue and ad pressure," he says.