When I first heard about the financial crisis, I began to worry about losing my job. I was, and am, the editor of a small trade magazine, and I correctly predicted a sharp downturn in advertising revenue. Now that Ben Bernanke says the recession is “likely over,” the death watch is off, for now at least. Some signs of stability have returned to the company, and the threat of the axe dropping has been tempered. But the industry was dying before people stopped spending money, and it’s unclear if the trickle-down effects from the financial crisis were triggering the decaying processes or simply accelerating them.

As of now, I show up to work every weekday, wondering if this will be my last job in the industry, which comes with its own sort of sick irony. For all the ways to get information, led by the Internet, it seems like good reporting is needed now more than ever to fill the darkness that the Internet can’t quite reach with its populist, kamikaze approach. The financial crisis seems fully avoidable in retrospect; most of the information was out there for people to realize that the consequences of their decisions would hold dire group consequences, but since this information never cohered in one place, it took the fall of Lehman Brothers to cement Newton’s law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It will catch up to you, even if you think it won’t.

Thus you can see the financial crisis as a result of two processes: a series of increasing, and increasingly ill-considered, bets on the housing market, and the commensurate silence from a drowning news industry. There have always been unreported stories out there, but for an entire industry to effectively miss this one signals either the final death knell or merely the low point in a sine wave-like cycle, and for all the shrieking otherwise, there are reasons to be optimistic that it is the latter.

What the industry lacked in before-the-fact reporting, it made up for in reflective analysis. Virtually every major traditional American publication had at least one—and usually several—thoughtful, well-reasoned articles that attributed a root cause to the crisis, and the way these articles pieced together without overlapping showed the potential for a new, vibrant media landscape to effectively tackle complex subjects. To be sure, each publication was acting in its own financial self-interest to cover the crisis, but it is just as certain that the varied takes from America’s best writers and top intellectuals have taken the patchwork process of learning and industrialized it.

Maybe it’s just in my head, I don’t know, but the whole effort seemed more concerted than normal, as if the problem was being attacked as a group rather than as separate authoritative news entities. In essence, traditional media outlets have taken the Internet’s idea of branding and specificity—everyone with a specialty—and divided the industry into fiefdoms. Or at least that’s what happened in this case. The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone all published page one financial crisis articles and barely so much as stepped on one another’s pinkies in their reporting. Malcolm Gladwell had a wisp of a story in The New Yorker about the CEO of Bear Stearns, who he tidily pegged as an overconfident brute. Clocking in at lithe three pages, Gladwell leaps to ask, “Was the crisis caused by overconfidence?” From exactly one case study, he has submitted a Grand Theory — one that depends on the work of the reader elsewhere to put it into proper context. To simply repeat the theory as fact would be the mark of a fool; it’s a merely brushstroke in a painting, the abstractness of which we are attempting to determine.

As recently as 9/11, this was not the case. On 9/11, the media landscape looked much the same as it had for the previous 40 years, run by autonomous, self-interested entities with websites providing almost entirely reprinted and supplementary material. What was written elsewhere hardly mattered; your readers were your readers, and there was a good chance if The Atlantic had a similar article, your readers would never see it. Now, the entire industry is built not just on the premise that readers will find stories “horizontally” that suit their interest, but on the promise they will do so.

Much is made from this landscape in which “information wants to be free,” and many believe that monetizing the horizontal setup is not possible. That seems to me to be a load of bullshit. It may not be feasible to monetize it yet, but that doesn’t mean there’s a lack of interest in credible stories from recognizable media; in fact, the horizontal search has pushed interest beyond any limit that has existed in the past. The ability to consume news now is unparalleled, and the new titans in this field are only beginning to emerge. Some are brands, like The New York Times; others, like Andrew Sullivan, are people. All of them are giving their stuff away for free.

The fear within the industry seems to be that the emergence of new, authoritative voices has been so profound, and has happened so fast, that people would never pay for content because the number of professional-quality works would be almost limitless—effectively, the “World is Flat” theory. I think this is wrong. I think the world is still being discovered. In any medium, there will be a small section of people who master it better than anyone else, and the Internet is no different. The names dominating the discourse now — Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, Nate Silver, Michelle Malkin — will dominate it 10 years from now. There will be more, to be sure, but they will help the move to monetization, not hinder it: there will be a better product to sell.

It hasn’t happened yet because the simple act of giving everyone an Internet browser opened a giant information chasm we are still struggling to fill. It’s not that the industry, or its allure, is weak; it’s that the power of the Internet is so strong we are barely making a dent in its potential. Nature abhors a vacuum, and we are still filling it, but as we get better at it we get closer to the point where good online reporting will command a price. There’s too much demand for it, and the best people are too good at it for monetization not to work. At some point the party will stop and people will pay to read the best. When will that be? I don’t know, but probably sooner than you think. Will it be fast enough to save my career? I don’t know. Maybe not. But maybe it will, and when you pull up my article you’ll tell people about how you read me a long time ago on Last Exit and—gasp!—did it for free.

Bryan Joiner likes to write about politics, sports, literature, philosophy and television, occasionally all at the same time. He is a contributing editor for Last Exit and the founder and editor of garlic, Shea Stadium, Martha’s Vineyard, and A-Rod for Last Exit.

Copyright Last Exit 2009