Update: another good round-up of the problems facing the newspaper and journalism businesses can be found here at Mindy McAdam’s blog.

It’s true that there’s nothing terribly revelatory about Frank Rich’s column “The American Press on Suicide Watch” in the NYT. But as Mathew Ingram twittered this morning, it’s a good, clear summation of how we now find ourselves in this unending, ubiquitous discussion about ‘the news’. If you haven’t been following the drama, this is certainly a good place to start.

But the conversation this article summarises has also been interesting from a cultural perspective. One of the reasons ‘the news’ has piqued my interest is how the debate has circled around a particular idea of truth. After all, we exist in a moment when we have finally seen postmodern notions of truth begin to manifest in a broad, widespread way on the internet. What but the web is more emblematic of either, in a ‘mainstream sense’, the subjectivity of truth or, from a more cynical perspective, the often interchangeable relationship between power and knowledge, truth and materiality?

But at its core, the idea that the press is central to democracy rests on the more traditional idea that ‘the truth needs to come out’ and that there is no institution better suited to accomplish this than ‘the news biz’. Fair enough. The 20th century has seen numerous examples of the import of this idea, whether in Watergate or, as an inverse example anyway, the lead-up to the Iraq war. As such, it would be silly and facile to fall back on easy, academic statements like “there’s, like, no truth man”. Sure, in an abstract sense it might be true, but then, midway through this sentence, the practical problem with such an approach is already apparent.

Yet, at the same time, Rich’s insistence on a sharp division between reportage and opinion is overly stark, his assertion that the opinionated nature of blogging is just ‘bloviating’, unsettling. A good example of why is the recent focus on Somali pirates. The dramatic ‘rescue’ of an American crew from a ‘lawless band of pirates’ was cast in  black-and-white terms in which the marines led a heroic and brutally efficient mission (one CNN story simply celebrated what amazing skill it must have taken to snipe two of the pirates simultaneously). But what became clear shortly after was that mainstream outlets like CNN missed part of the story, whether the history of ‘pirating’ in Somalia or the importance of the pirates to contemporary Somalian culture. Missing half of the information while presenting itself as ‘objective’, the traditional media failed. Perhaps just as importantly, they did not fail because there was too much opinion; it’s that there wasn’t enough of it.

In many ways, Rich is quite right: the news business is in trouble, but it is often invaluable to making us more informed and safer and we need to figure out a way to fund it. But when he argues that blogging and the web can, at best, only overtake the mundane minutiae of reporting – the town council meeting, for example – he misses the fact that the expansion of voices and, yes, opinions, has provided us with more, not less, information and, furthermore, that it is often from perspectives that heretofore have been silenced. This, it seems, is important.

I don’t have any grand ideas for the news. It’s not my thing; it’s not my area. What I can suggest though, is that the focus should not either be on saving traditional media or simply making the news participatory and ‘two-point-oh-y’. Instead, we should be aiming to meld old and new media to make the news more complete, to see the web’s low barriers of entry as working to improve, rather than destroy journalism. After all, we may never be able to ‘get the truth’, but the more voices we have, the closer we might be able to get.