Why is it that traditional journalists, when asked to review new media, invariably begin with a ubiquitous, “well, I don’t use Twitter myself but …” before launching into a sneering tirade decrying it as a cyber hellhole populated entirely by illiterate goons who happily spend each waking hour directing a torrent of libellous abuse at high-profile innocents in the hopes of making their mascara run?

Bloggers, tweeters and those who post on internet fora such as boards.ie and politics.ie are scoffed at, sneered at and, generally, treated with the same sort of disdain that one normally reserves for those drunken idiots who think nothing of dropping their pants and defecating in the middle of the street after a night out. In fact, I’m sure I’ve seen that exact metaphor used to describe much of the material that can be found in internet forums.

The jailing last week of a 21-year-old Welsh student who decided to cap a day spent drinking by logging onto Twitter and posting racist slurs about footballer Fabrice Muamba, who remains in a serious condition after he collapsed at a recent FA Cup game, has only served to copperfasten the keyboard-warrior stereotype of the social networking site.

In reality, Liam Stacey is an aberration and the immediate online reaction to his vile racist comments, universal condemnation which resulted in him posting a grovelling apology for his remarks long before the police knocked on his door, highlights the majority opinion of the online community — a zero-tolerance consensus when it comes to those who mistake freedom of expression for freedom to defame.

That’s not to say that there are not loathsome trolls lurking behind a mask of anonymity, who use their poison pen, and poor spelling, to try to provoke a reaction. Of course they exist, but the best policy when it comes to these halfwits is not to get angry, or even get even, but just to ignore them. Without the oxygen of attention, those sad individuals, who use social media to launch vitriolic personal attacks on people they’ve never even met, soon return to obscurity and their deep-seated feelings of inadequacy.

The mistake of many in print and broadcast journalism is to react with wounded feelings when online critics dare to express an opinion that is divergent to their own and arrogantly write off the tens of thousands of ordinary people who regularly use new media to express honestly held opinions as deviant or stupid or both.

This deeply entrenched “them and us” attitude arises, primarily, because of fear and distrust. Media is in a state of flux at the moment that could see, if current trends continue unabated, the demise of print journalism altogether.

All over the world newspapers with proud and long-standing records of breaking stories, and providing an important public service for their respective communities, are going to the wall as readers migrate online. In most cases it is only when those newspapers are gone that people realise what they are missing — quality journalism, comment and analysis from a source they can trust.

Irish people’s traditional affinity for buying a daily newspaper means that the decline in sales is not yet terminal here, but the time for wringing hands and just wishing the internet away is long since passed. Business as usual is not an option anymore — something has to give and it’s not going to be the internet.

Print journalists, and their employers, should not be so insecure about the marketability of their talents and skills. Most bloggers don’t have the time or the resources to spend days, weeks or months investigating stories of public interest.

Most cannot spend time covering courts or Dáil sittings or any number of events that you’ll read about each day in newspapers like the Irish Examiner. They would equally baulk at the thought of getting out of bed at some ungodly hour of the morning to visit the scene of a murder, in order to interview witnesses, and few would entertain the notion of knocking on the door of a recently bereaved family, unannounced, in order to try to get their side of the story.

Newspapers retain an edge on much of the myriad information that is swilling around in cyberspace because of the investment of media companies in journalists and photographers who go out and unearth, verify and add context to the news.

In truth, there is something of a symbiotic relationship between old and new media. It is often the work of traditional journalists, who have broken stories or covered important news events, that is discussed online following its publication. True, the debate is not always the prettiest, sometimes becoming unnecessarily bitter, but, equally, one can often find thoughtful, insightful and witty posts online and, increasingly, valuable original content in blogs like thestory.ie and namawinelake.wordpress.com.

However, without the existence of traditional media, many of the most popular stories being debated online right now would not have come to public attention at all.

Regrettably, newspapers can’t survive on the feelgood factor derived from publishing stories in the public interest. Alan Crosbie, the chairman of Thomas Crosbie Holdings which owns this newspaper, has called for State funding to be extended from RTÉ to broadsheet newspapers but, not least because of EU competition law, this simply won’t happen.

Instead, something much more difficult has to be undertaken — an attempt to convince a readership, used to an all-you-can-eat buffet of free news, that it’s worth spending a couple of quid each week to pay for the news that so many resources have gone into creating.

Without this investment the continued existence of newspapers becomes harder to rationalise. What’s the point of a newspaper, full of press releases and regurgitated information when one could get the exact same news by joining a couple of governmental mailing lists? Newspapers, and indeed broadcasters, need to invest in their content — the thing that sets them apart from all of the competition — so they can continue to scoop their rivals with original material and provide loyal readers with stories, and analysis, that they simply won’t be able to get elsewhere.

Increasingly, the danger is that declines in sales and advertising revenues will lead to a vicious circle of cutbacks and layoffs that will whittle away journalists’ ability to act as society’s bloodhounds, sniffing out news stories, transforming them, instead, into glorified press officers.

The internet is a big place and there is ample room for both old and new media, but unless traditional media groups accept the reality that any future growth is going to be internet-based, and realistically plan to exploit the growing market in mobiles and tablets, then their future cannot be assured.

Niche products with a captive audience, like the Financial Times, have proven that pay walls do not have to sound the death knell for newspapers. The challenge, for those that do not enjoy such a narrowly defined niche, is to engage with their readers and devise a pay wall that will not scare them off when they have the temerity to ask for money in exchange for making their work available online.

This piece was first published in the Irish Examiner on April 4 2012.