Tony Snow recently told his audience at the Media Institute that "everyone needs to realize that the days of the old-fashioned newsroom are over. It’s a different world out there – wilder, more competitive, and much less predictable than even a decade ago":

Rather than cursing innovation, journalists need to embrace it. They need to get out of their cubicles and plunge into the task that drew most of us into the business in the first place –the challenge of engaging a chaotic world filled with willful fellow human beings; a world of joy and agony; of triumph and crushing failure; a world united by love and atomized by hatreds and aggression, [sic: comma in original--Ed]

The democratic media provide new tools for examining our world, new competitors for reporting about that world, and new reminders to the press establishment that markets really do work – and people want better than they’re getting.

I come not to bury journalism, but to celebrate and challenge it. It’s a cliché that every crisis presents an opportunity, but it’s true: The democratization of the media is a good thing. We now face competition from all quarters – including from people who have specialized expertise that journalists lack. We ought to welcome the new participants in the game and learn from them. They should do the same with us.

There’s an old boast in the business – that the job of a journalist is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The thing is, we never realized that we were becoming The Comfortable – with good pay, job security, and access to movers and shakers all around the world. We need to cast off our coziness — venture away from safe stories and presumptions and into the wilderness of new topics, new ideas and new sources of information.
In that quest lies the possibility of fulfillment and joy — and the hope of keeping alive the text and the spirit of the First Amendment.