The Essential Edge is pleased to add another column - Mort Unplugged - to its ranks.  This is written by veteran journalist and author, Mort Rosenblum, editor and cofounder of Dispatches Magazine, a recently established international quarterly working with The Essential Edge and other partners to improve public awareness through critical and independent quality  reporting of global issues worldwide. The latest issue is Out of Poverty.

PARIS - When USA Today appeared in 1982, we pterosaurs (you know, toothy jaws, extinct: reporters) laughed it off as the newspaper for people who find TV too challenging. These days, its America-first, news-bits-for-dummies formula typifies our national view of the world. And now we've recently had Jon Stewart's ever-lovable Jason Jones laughing off The New York Times as a silly relic that only a grandmother could love. Stewart, who unfailingly gets it, keeps reminding us he is a comedian. That was a spoof, funny if painful, of what so many of us now call "news." Bill Keller, the Times' grandpa executive editor, made the real point when Jones sneered at red ink the paper bleeds while Huffington Post rakes in ad profits. "The last time I was in Baghdad I didn't see a Huffington Post bureau or a Google bureau or a Drudge Report bureau there," Keller said. Real foreign coverage is expensive and dangerous, he said. "It's a lot easier to sit home and riff on the work that somebody else does."

Huffpost is a cocktail party where the famous or the most articulate, unpaid, talk the loudest. Some of it makes good reading. But to report, you've got to be there. Later, when Keller went to Iran, cocktail commentators jumped on him for not staying home where he belongs. An executive editor who goes to see the story? What a concept.

"News" that helps us avert calamity is a complex mix of fast-changing realities. You don't cover a story; you uncover it. And only the best get it right. Keller's eye for detail and ear for what counts let us see and hear the Soviet collapse. He won a Pulitzer in 1989 and stayed. He took us to South Africa as apartheid ended. His Iran dispatches might help U.S. policymakers avoid doing something seriously stupid. That's what newspapers - the Fourth Estate - are meant to do.

Go back over the Times' Iran coverage: correspondents; the Farsi-speaking local staff; Roger Cohen, whose wisdom is based on being there over the years; and all the rest. Coverage costs more than money. David Rohde, who shares in the Times' Pulitzer for Afghanistan this spring, just escaped after seven months in Taliban captivity.

Of course, the Times can be insufferably smug and blind to some important stories. But this is not about whether you want your daughter to marry a Sulzberger. "Foreign news" (the stuff that can keep us out of war or ruin) ranks low on most-emailed lists.

Responsible publishers carry it anyway. The Times bleeds money because it keeps spending to cover a hostile, overheating world for people happy to riff on its product and read it online for free. We need other papers - and other real "media" -- to hit where it misses.

In Iran, reporters are now confined to offices. Police arrested Newsweek's Maziar Bahari. We need pros, competing but cooperating, to see through veils and weave backdrops. We can still find excellent, courageous reporting across the world. But we have to protect it and fortify it. The Los Angeles Times, which I once preferred, is down to a few noble pros battling uphill.

The Washington Post, sometimes still great, is a shadow of its old self. Others, we all know, are shriveling fast. The Miami Herald once amounted to a local paper throughout Latin America. Now it has no correspondents, not even in Mexico. The Associated Press should be our backstop. But its CEO, the man who shaped USA Today, has retooled it. AP hits some stories hard but ignores too many others that matter. AP started last century as a hard-news cooperative to report a world that newspapers could not cover on their own. That lasted through the 20th century.

The new AP reflects the decline of newspapers - really, a decline of publishers - and a need to find new revenue in the razzle-dazzle industry of not-really-news. This recent AP lead paragraph, in corporatespeak, says it all: "The Associated Press hopes to negotiate more lucrative licensing deals with major Web sites while mining new revenue from advertisers and readers as the 163-year-old news cooperative adapts to Internet-driven changes in the media."

An "interview" with the writer's boss followed. For Americans, dogfights in Brooklyn have always eclipsed revolutions in China, as the old Brooklyn Eagle crowed. Yet publishers felt the compunction to cover China.

Today, it's a different game. Newspaper executives are seldom newspapermen. And there is so much else out there. My files bulge with stuff like a blog by the editor who rode Denver's redoubtable Rocky Mountain News into the ground. He asks why we "whine" about vanishing dailies. One online outfit sent Joe the Plunger to Israel as a "foreign correspondent." Remember Joe? (In fact, remember John McCain?) His reporting was enough to stop up plumbing.

Again, the mantra: It's about news, not newspapers. If you're not there, you'll get it wrong. If you're there without sufficient skills and sources, you'll be misled. Corporate branders have convinced too many that getting "news" first in a few meaningless words trumps getting it right or explaining why nuances are so crucial. Jason Jones befuddled a Times editor, telling him the paper's day-old delivery is "aged news."

When I told a friend I was writing this, she said I was too late - that Daily Show was last week. Ah, aged comment. In a funny interview on the Times' Web site after he taped the show, Jones asked to be serious. "Without institutions like yours," he said, "news would not exist." But too many people took his spoof as a true portrayal of print's dying role. If we let them stamp out what the best newspapers do, not even Jon Stewart can save us.

This speed business is mostly bogus. Global warming "broke" as a story in 1975. The Iraq War started back in 1917. Iran? Maybe 2,500 years ago. I used to love that old deadline-every-minute news agency buzz, but looking back at my AP stories since 1967 I shirk in shame at how much we all got so dreadfully wrong. We need fast reliable news alerts, but we must also put journal back in journalism. Good newspapers can do that.

As these fade away, we need something else. The medium doesn't matter. I vote for newspapers, but I'm a pterosaur. Online delivery can work fine if competent editors and skilled reporters establish credibility. Whatever the medium, reporting is hollow without an underpinning of context, history, and cultural setting. It is not reliable if we do not know we can trust the source.

When I decided to reinvent myself after 40 years with AP, a wire animal, I launched Dispatches with a co-editor and companion from the road, Gary Knight. We designed a close-to-the-news quarterly that takes one world-changing subject at a time, using only writers and photographers who experience their stories firsthand.

In "Beyond Iraq," Rod Nordland conveyed raw reality in a place he had covered for Newsweek since the 1980s. Iraq was far from "over" after that surge as guesswork had it. (Since then, Rod found a new job despite massive cuts in the business: at the New York Times. He alone is worth the cover price.) I'd love to claim dispatches will save us, but it won't.

I also write for GlobalPost, an admirable new online agency with a promising future. That won't do it, either. The problem is not the news business but rather its market: Us. If enough of us demand better, we might actually get it.

The catch is that we will have to pay. Even without printing costs, ads alone won't fund the Kellers and Roger Cohens or new people who must replace them. Government subsidy or philanthropy carries a price. Is a buck or so a day too much for a paper, or paid online access, to shield us from catastrophic ignorance? Your call. Real news has been free for so long that this will be a hard sell.

But it's worth a shot. Rally your friends. Go buy any good - good -- newspaper you can still find. Polls show our national bugaboo, beyond our borders, is still terror. What terrifies me after a life of watching real news up close is the thought of following today's world via 140-character tweets, cocktail party twaddle, and USA Today.

Mort Rosenblum, journalist, author, educator, and eater, has assigned himself the immodest mission of saving the world. Having covered crises on seven continents over four decades, he suspects this is a bit too ambitious for an aging Quixote who knocks off Decembers to harvest his olives. But plenty of like-minded people are at work on the most urgent goals: to rescue "the media"; to reclaim democracy; to halt terracide; to fight poverty and plagues; to curb corporate colonialism; and to set a great but misguided nation back on course.