The discursive setup of this evening's panel discussion about online journalism was paper-bad, paper-good versus online good or bad. And all that under the roof of the New York Public Library that in collaboration with Google digitizes most of its book collection. 

The star of the evening was Slate.com, the most widely read online magazine that just celebrated its tenth anniversary. A lustrous group of journalists in slick expressive outfits were assembled on the podium. There was Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate, who dressed in a white striped suit, looking a bit like a 1930s Chicago mobster or a Floridian plantation owner. Then there was Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker magazine, Arianna Huffington of the meta-blog The Huffington Post, Norm Pearlstine- former editor of Time, Jacob Weisberg- editor of Slate, and its founding editor Michael Kinsley. They all struggled with issues surrounding online journalism for a good hour.

Ten years ago Kinsley was among the first to have the idea that there could be benefits from doing what journalists do, but online. He knocked on Microsoft's doors and proposed to see the web as a creative opportunity: No stamps get wasted on newspaper distribution and perhaps Slate could be downloaded and then printed at home (well, that did not quite turn out this way). For the blogosphere Slate is now mainstream, while for the print press it's still just a blog. But not too long ago the Washington Post bought Slate.com magazine from Microsoft. 

Ten years ago people stipulated if the Internet will live on. Today, Kinsley argued, the question is if there will still be paper-based news in ten years. The newness of the "online," frequently used as noun by the panelists- perhaps to avoid the techy term Internet, does not kill off paper. ("The promise of online.") It was argued that Slate is no longer new media; it's rather a "medium" media. Old and new media, Michael Kinsley put forward, are layered on top of what's already there. "New media is things on top of other things." Huffington rejected that whole dichotomy thinking between "online" and "paper." It reminded her of the Ginger-or-Maryanne-Question that is so hopelessly old-fashioned. What about a lush threesome, she asked?

Jacob Weisberg thinks that it will take until some gorgeous gadget comes out that allows us to take Slate.com comfortably on the road. Weisberg: "We’re waiting for the iPod of reading. Someone’s going to invent it. And when that happens that’s going to be a huge advantage to us.” But in fact, one can already do that. One can feed a text-cast of Slate.com on the Ipod, for example. But all this is not quite as developed as it needs to be to really catch on.   

Norm Pearlstine commented that the question is not so much about a romanticism for paper or the online world. Online journalism is not a thread to printed newspapers. He located the danger in "search:" advertisers are realizing that database marketing is more efficient than placing an ad in a newspaper. That, he said, is the real danger for print media. The Wall Street Journal now cuts barely even and the San Francisco Chronicle was basically wiped out by Craigslist, which hardly makes any money.           

The advent of the paperless office, however, turned out to be a complete myth. The computer is in fact paper's best friend. Paper is not that primitive 19th century thing anymore: it'll certainly not disappear.

But young teenage brains function oh so differently (supposedly): studies showed that teens prefer watching anything on a computer to seeing it on TV, for example. Huffington confirmed that with her own daughter. But she also pointed out that there are still plenty of super rich people out there: why buy a Picasso if you can get a whole newspaper; it is afterall the ultimate prestige symbol. Case in point is the LA Times that currently has several competing potential buyers who are still willing to pay about one billion dollars for a mainly print-based newspaper.  

Slate quickly discovered that voice was different online. Online, people act obsessively. Net publics want to be more engaged, they want to stay on top of a story. Bloggers can incubate a story like a hen sitting on an egg. When print media need new information to write a follow-up on a story, bloggers can just reaffirm their outrage.  

Quite contrary to writing for print, Huffington claimed, personality, passion, an engaging and revealing writing style with a certain humorous, and intimate tone is central when it comes to online journalism. Also, most people don’t like reading long articles online. Slate.com articles are limited to 1000 words. The skills needed for online writing are different than those of writers who work for a print-based newspaper. "Unless they can swim in new waters".. they are useless.

And then there is the syntax of hyperlinks. Huffington criticized newspapers like the New York Times for charging money for access to their archive. She claimed that these sites could attract so much traffic with their archived articles that would translate into dollars also. Right now, people can't link to these NYT articles. "Unless you have really bad porn on your site, it should not be behind a subscription wall." 

Whom do we hold up as ultimate journalists, as believable sources: The New York Times or the bloggers? 

Huffington just returned from Las Vegas where she attended the Blogger Conference. There a presidential candidate threw a swanky $90,000 party to sway the cadre of bloggers.

Malcolm Gladwell inserted himself charismatically but with a rather odd premise that somehow assumed that print magazines are still the future. He painted a picture of a pre-paper, highly technologized world that would suddenly be shaken up by the invention of paper. Wow! That would be a cool surprise: it's light and cheap, you can fold it up, and so on. But his emphatic, attention getting argumentation was quickly dissected by Norm Pearlstine who corrected Gladwell by pointing out that in fact the distribution of a newspaper is more expensive than its digital distributed equivalent. All panelists agreed that books are unlikely to ever get replaced but that printed newspapers will indeed radically loose importance.      

Gladwell, however, painted another scenario that hit the spot much more than his first assertion. He brought up the airline industry. Boing makes money selling airplanes. Pilots make money flying the planes. All seem to make money- just not the airline that runs the business. He ported this metaphor to the print newsmedia who don't make much profit but their carcass feeds many. He described the blogosphere as feeding off the carcass of the print media who pay much to sustain their staff and to do investigative reporting. That is often the argument when it comes to blogging: don't worry about the blogosphere; bloggers don't have the 1200 editors that the New York Times employs and they can't afford to pay 5 million dollars a month to sustain a headquarter in Iraq. In the eyes of many this discredits the blogosphere that is just based on comments on comments on comments. People write book reviews without even having read the book that they are reviewing but they are eloquent in responding to the comments about the book: What is happening to the future of content?

But Ariane Huffington, whose widely exposed clevage was tomato-red by now, quite brilliantly shot back with the question: Who did a better job reporting the lead-up to the war in Iraq, the New York Times or the blogosphere? -- Silence -- then: applause. Huffington memorized a list of articles that the NYT published, which make the newspaper co-responsible for the atrocities that happened next. In response to the question if she stopped reading the NYT because of this, she said "of course I did."

More articles on the topic: YahooNews, Alex Halavais,  David Cohn, David Hirschman, and Dylan Stableford