Mr Beecher warned that Fairfax’s decision this week to sack staff at its flagship broadsheet newspapers — The Sydney Morning Herald in Sydney and The Age in Melbourne — would blow a hole in this country’s traditional quality media that all of the new media’s bloggers and websites would not be able to fill. He said that included the online publications he was involved in, such as Crikey and Business Spectator. “What’s at risk here is the role of well researched, serious journalism to act as a check and balance in the system of democracy,” he told ABC. “Online media can replace part of it. The four websites I’m involved in employ 30 or 40 full-time journalists, which is quite a lot in independent media terms, but compared with 300 or 400 journalists on big daily newspapers it is fairly small.

I don’t necessarily think he’s wrong but I do think it’s way too early to tell, after all we’re still in a period where a thousand flowers have yet to bloom.

But he warned that few observers had predicted the current threat to quality journalism.

Odd, I distinctly remember seeing Philip Knightley speak on this exact topic a few years ago here in Sydney, and he wasn’t the only esteemed MSM survivor to sound a warning, it’s been said for years.

Returning for a moment to letting a thousand flowers bloom we get this from Beecher.

It would be controversial, he said, but politicians “need to look at it now and think, if we don’t do anything, then in a decade’s time the idea of well-resourced, quality journalism — with hundreds of journalists covering parliament and business and investigative journalism and the courts — will be gone”.

We can have hundreds of journalists covering these things, the problem for guys like Beecher is that they can’t see past the old model of what a journalist should look like.

I’ve always had an answer for this and yes, it does go to the old blogger/journalist question – let bloggers into the loop and the best of them will bubble up as a new form of distributed journalism takes hold. Give them access, the same access, to the courts, the press gallery etc.

Bust the old cozy arrangements the usual suspects have with each other. Lets not stand on ceremony or credentialism, let even more flowers bloom. Sure the transition is uncertain but what other choice is there to to the current malaise?