Back in the day when news came in newspapers, old editors used to upbraid self-important young reporters with a quick, pointed question: "Yeah, so what did you do for me today.'' Oh for the good old days. Now the challenge is, "What did you do for me 10 minutes ago," or five, and the compression of time has changed the whole dynamic of "news" in America. It takes a much larger volume of "news'' to feed the news-driven Internet than it took to fill any newspaper, and there is a greater and greater demand for that "news'' now, now, now! Stories on which reporters used to spends days, weeks or sometimes even months are now sometimes expected to be turned around in hours, sometimes minutes.

The result has been a general decay in the quality of every individual story, though the quality of the whole might actually have improved. News gathering is lot like intelligence work. Reporters have bits and pieces of the picture -- she said this, he said that, so-and-so believes such -- and from that they try to put together a picture of what happened. Some reporters can be very smug about how good they are at this. Most of them don't know how little they know about most of the things about which they write.

The reality of reporting is that a reporter almost never knows enough, and thus things are likely to get screwed up in ways big or little every time. Back in the day, when there was time for checking and double-checking and rechecking, things got screwed up less. That was a good thing, but it was also a bad thing. Because a lot of things, especially things about government and the people who run it, didn't get reported because, well, reporters just couldn't quite get the story firmed up to the nth degree. Still, there was something comforting about the old days.

News consumers (that's you, the man or woman reading this) got delivered a nicely wrapped sausage. It looked OK. It usually didn't smell too bad. And you could often enjoy digesting it if you didn't think too much about what went into it.

Forget that. Today, you're far more likely to be picking through the sausage-makings as they just sort of spray willy-nilly out of the meat grinder of news-lebrity that has replaced the news. "News-lebrity" is what evolved to fill the empty space when the news business grew to fill the new world of constant news. News-lebrity is defined by ... well, who the hell knows what it is defined by.

Fate? Whim? Fantasy? All-powerful media Goddess Sarah Palin? I don't know. I only know that one of the big stories in Anchorage Wednesday was whether 19-year-old Bristol Palin, Sarah's daughter, broke the law by doing a publicity event for a TV show by appearing at a bar. There have been no accusations that she had a drink in the bar. There have been no accusations that she did anything immoral, unethical or even significant in the bar -- not that significance seems to matter much anymore.

Oh no, no, no. Bristolgate centered solely on whether Bristol was in a bar -- or was the bar a restaurant -- when she shouldn't have been because she is under age, and heaven knows we wouldn't want her coming under the influence of Old John Barleycorn, the taste of liquor having never before touched those sweet Wasilla lips.

So much for that. The authorities were investigating, and the media, yours truly included, was all over it. Personally, I'll confess, I was in on the silliness for the laughs. The world needs more humor. Everyone's gotten just a little too uptight and confrontational. We could use some Keystone Kops chasing our own Betty Boop through the streets of Anchorage to lighten things up. And a lot of what passes for news these days is funny if you don't take it too seriously.