Facts and figures do not compel readers, stories do; readers and ‘new media users' want more than the information rich, but story-skimpy new media outlets

As newspapers, magazines, trade publications and newsletters creep on to the Web, this swells the demand for reporters, who can keystroke simple sentences and strings of numbers. New media positions do not increase the job market for journalists.

For this purpose, I'd define reporting as nuts-and-bolts, no-nonsense information-gathering and packaging. Reporting wants just the facts, ma'am. Journalism entails investigation, explanation and a point of view. Journalists are story-tellers, fascinated with the human experience, alert to the drama of conflict and struggle, infinitely curious about the motives and meanings behind events. Reporters use nouns and verbs as blunt utilitarian instruments. Journalists indulge in figures of speech; they use words as symbols, to evoke empathy, indignation, pity or anger. Most of what appears in Star or the National Enquirer is journalism, albeit of a very ripe kind. Most of Investor's Business Daily is reporting.

Journalism inherently requires that stories be told in-depth. Many newspapers have cut out long articles, even before the Internet. They've followed the example set by television news. They've been hit by the rising price of newsprint, and the renewed emphasis on cost-cutting. They're convinced that readers are pressed for time, impatient with detail, and conditioned to ingest the news in pellet-like form.

Of course, the same readers are not so pressed for time that they can't watch the O.J. Simpson trial, or the Olympics, or reruns of very bad movies. People who choose not to read are not cut off from the news. The movies, radio, and later television have deepened the public's acquaintance with the wider world - at least with its memorable horrors and tragedies.

The bulk of broadcast news is reporting, in the sense that I used it earlier, rather than journalism. It is epitomized by the two-minute wire service radio bulletin on the hour, already a fast disappearing format. "German armies marched into Poland today from five directions." "President Kennedy was shot and killed today in Dallas." Just the facts, ma'am.

Electronic news carries the danger of degenerating into the equivalent of the old stock market ticker tape, spewing out an endless series of figures and symbols geared to the transitory and the insignificant. Occasionally the stream of numbers was interrupted by a terse headline announcing an unexpected calamity that might affect the market.

Information isn't knowledge, and facts don't add up to wisdom. The preoccupation with data is at odds with the journalistic quest for meaning, a quest that can only be met through the insights that come from accumulated experience.

I know an economic journalist who has spent a long and distinguished career specializing in one of the world's leading industries. He has interviewed and hobnobbed with all of the principal players and has acquired an intimate familiarity with the technology, economics and politics of an extraordinarily complex global business.

To keep active after his retirement from a senior editorial position, he has become a consultant to one of the many electronic news services that have sprung up in the last few years. He is stunned by the emphasis on up-to-the-minute reports on pricing, trading, transactions, investments, personnel shifts and all the other evanescent minutiae of the market.

He faces a profound distrust of intelligent interpretation of the big forces and long term trends that shape the industry's future direction. The management suspects his motives in wanting to attend a major industry conference he has covered for years. "We have a stringer in London. He can handle it!" Sure, he can summarize the handouts.

Are we entering an age of universal access to massive amounts of raw, unbundled information, which anyone can take or leave in any quantities desired?

In electronic databases, the public has at its disposal an incredible reference facility, with innumerable business and scholarly uses. But it's not going to make journalism an obsolete skill.

You can put "War and Peace" on a Web site, but who's going to read it all the way through? When people read for fun, they want to sit back in a relaxed posture, not all keyed up at the keyboard. That tense position goes well for an active information-search, but it's not the way people consume news. Computers lend themselves well to the display of terse factual data, like financial tables or sports results, but they are a far less comfortable medium for communicating narrative. Readers savor both the content and style of a good story, and print lets them move back and forth instantaneously from what they are reading to what they have read and are about to read.

Few private individuals have reason or inclination to conduct their own investigative search of secondary sources; people want information professionally picked, processed and interpreted. They want this done with an understanding of the human dramas that mere facts disguise and distort; they want it done with literary style, through the use of language that evokes imagery and emotions.

Mere reporting is fine for the monitor. Story-telling is the job of journalism - and of newspapers.

Bogart is the author of "Preserving the Press and of Commercial Culture: The Media System and the Public Interest."