This Forbes article by Trevor Butterworth has some interesting ideas to offer about journalism. I also enjoy the baroque language:

The answer to so much casual destruction is to stop hand-wringing and rebrand traditional media, including journalism. The problem with most journalists protesting about the nobility of journalism is that it doesn't sound convincing. Whining doesn't really offer itself up as a convincing branding strategy; and the political justification for journalism, namely the vital constitutional role of the media in American democracy, sounds both sanctimonious and pretentious—simply reminding people of the effluvial stench of journalism's sins instead of the grandeur of its triumphs. The public needs something to believe in rather than rail against, something elegantly simple and bipartisan that has sufficient aesthetic compulsion to sound pleasurable rather than penitential.

Butterworth believes that the answer is something he calls the slow word movement—a phrase which is supposed to make you think of the slow food movement, but which instead makes me want to do this—which is exemplified in McSweeney's San Francisco Panorama newspaper project:

The idea of consuming less, but better, media—of a "slow word" or "slow media" movement—is a strategy journalism should adopt. It will be painful, as it involves thinking about media as something sustainable, local and (hardest of all for hard-bitten hacks) pleasurable. But as the historian Michael Schudson has argued, it's simply unrealistic to expect the public to read newspapers as a daily personal moral commitment to democracy. Instead, look to what Dave Eggers has brilliantly shown with the San Francisco Panorama, namely that the physical quality of a newspaper and the aesthetic pleasure of reading can make people so excited about journalism that they'll buy it—not just conceptually, but in terms of parting with cash.

I wrote about the Panorama in last week's books section. It's an amazing object, and it feels like something special. I believe that Butterworth has a point, but it would probably be wiser for him to try this as a new and separate genre, outside of the current media framework. But if it is possible to train an audience to be as selective about journalism as—ugh—foodies are about food, you'll have done the world a great favor.