Bruce Sterling, writing for the Wired Blog Network, truly hit it out of the park the other morning. Bruce brought something BBC reporter Misha Glenny has been screaming about for a while now into the forefront of the blogosphere–where it belongs.

It is something Crime Rant has been wailing about for a long time now. It needs to be said. It needs to be put into this blogging format. And it needs to be passed around the Internet like a virus.

The premise of this blog is one of the reasons why Crime Rant is considering closing shop: Do we want to be part of the problem, or part of the solution?

In his piece, “Journalism isn’t blogging, and blogging isn’t journalism” (which you can see in its entirety here), Sterling goes after the jugular of Internet and its (so-called) reporters. In so many words, he points out how this whole Internet sleuthing phenomenon is no damn substitute for good old-fashioned reporting, or regular gumshoe journalism that many “journalists” have been doing for decades and decades, and how the Internet frenzy over news has changed things for the honest reporters out there humping it, working the phones, tracking down sources, following instincts and real leads.

As opposed to, say, logging onto MySpace or FaceBook and tracking down an old blog some alleged killer once wrote.

Sterling writes:

Former BBC correspondent Misha Glenny launched a forthright attack on the corporation today for the pressures it places on its reporters, and for hiring correspondents without the appropriate knowledge of the countries in which they operate.

“When I started at BBC, the model of a foreign correspondent was of a slightly detached boffin,” he said. “These people were like the Mark Tullys of this world, who knew everything about India and everybody worth knowing in the Indian elite.

“That’s all gone. The reporters who know their country now are rare phenomena. What the BBC needs now are young, enthusiastic, energetic people prepared to speak to the World Service one minute, then file 600 words for online and go on to Five Live straight after for a two-way. In such conditions basic reporting, let alone investigative reporting, is impossible.” …

He said: “Nowadays BBC correspondents are really under immense time pressure to deliver the news through a proliferation of outlets, with a 24-hour domestic news channel, a 24-hour World TV news channel, a 24-hour talk radio station (5 Live), the World Service, Radio 4 and so on. The BBC has a voracious appetite for news. But too many reports are culled from Reuters and AP”. (((”Don’t write it — just link to it.” In the blogosphere this is considered a major virtue.)))

… “Even in the BBC, which has exceptional resources and an exceptional editorial strategy, the net is having a profound impact on the way that BBC journalists carry out their work.” …

He then launched into criticism of the “entirely unregulated” internet because “there is no guarantee that the information is accurate.” He added: “If it is filtered through a brand name, then one can have a certain confidence… but the net is a fallible source. Combined with the economic pressures, it means that investigative journalism, in the long-term, is under threat.”

He concluded by calling on journalists from across the world to come together to discuss a strategy to deal with “the structural problems” now facing journalism. (((It’s a good idea. Journalism ought to at least write a magisterial, accurate summary of the demise of journalism.)))

Glenny has just spent three years writing a book on organised crime, McMafia: Crime without frontiers, that was published in April. He was taking part in a congress session entitled “Chasing the story: the challenges of transnational investigative journalism”. …

You see, when someone out there speaks the truth, it really hits at the core of what we here at Crime Rant want to project on our blog and, moreover, with our book reporting. Journalism is not electronic. Never was. Never will be. The electronic aspect of journalism is only a way to get the reporting out to bigger numbers. But when you have people stepping all over a piece of news, adding their spin to it, news becomes something entirely obsolete.

It is tainted.