I work for a magazine that's founded on the idea that you will pay us in advance so that we can tell you what you ought to know; to printing it on paper at great expense; to delivering it to you, also at great expense, so that you can read it from two to 10 days after the events in question. Doesn't that sound like an idiotic business proposition when you can see a video of important events, live, 24 hours a day, followed by plenty of more or less expert talking-head commentary, followed by supplemental Web cruising for rich detail?

Well, I can report from my small front of the information revolution that the forces of reaction are doing just fine, thank you. Our circulation is up. Ad sales are up. Our audience is getting younger and richer and better educated. These gains are outpacing what would be predicted from the economic boom.

What explains this quite perverse result? I want to focus on two reasons, which I think shed some light on the benefits and also the limitations of digital news distribution.

First, I think magazines are a really neat technology. You can take it onto a plane. You can take it in the bathroom. You can skip the ads. You can wad it into your breast pocket. You can take it out later; you don't have to boot up again. There are obvious advantages to huge databases and the wonderful things you can do on the Internet. For information workers, for people like me, it's great to be able to scan vast quantities of material and get all sorts of detail. For bond salesmen, for people who need instant information or to have vast sources at their fingertips, it's wonderful.

But, otherwise, it's kind of clunky to have to carry a computer around with you, at least so far. Now, over time, the advantages of paper, I think, will succumb to technical advance. Things will be downloaded to perhaps a flexible screen you could stick in your pocket. Or maybe they can be downloaded to some neat backlit thing on your glasses and you can get wonderful color graphics seamlessly as you wander around. So, that will be a challenge to a magazine like mine.

The second competitive advantage of my dinosaur magazine is the word that was used at some length in the last panel, which is trust. Even when people can easily be deluged by CNN and Sky Channel and C-SPAN and Drudge and a huge collection of other free electronic sources, they are still ready to plunk down 50 bucks a year for a stranger's editorial judgment, which boils down to the task of sorting out which droplets in this great firehose of data are worth your neurons. Our newsstand sales are, also sort of perversely, always greatest after big events that everybody's watched on television, like Diana's funeral or the Oklahoma City bombing. There is nothing like TV to make you feel like you're there, and nothing like the Internet to put all sorts of things at your fingertips, and that amount of information is infinite and growing.

But both TV and the Web, in their different ways, do not give consumers everything that they need and want. Millions don't find electronic fare sufficiently nutritious as presently delivered. They want to chew on something less evanescent. And the contract in our being the chefs for this menu is not that readers will like everything that we will serve up, but that they will trust us to provide some acceptable combination of spinach, oatmeal, garlic, ice cream and experimental cuisine -- and, most important, that the editors will work very hard to make sure that the reader can rely upon if not the cosmic truth of what they read, at least its accuracy and fairness in the workaday meaning of those terms.

In fact, as the data stream becomes impossibly huge for most people with normally busy lives to manage, I think people will find it increasingly valuable that some trustworthy other will package for them a kind of admission ticket to informed citizenship. They also like to be connected to a broader culture by reading not only where their own passions and eccentricities take them on the Web, but what other people are reading.

This desire of readers for some stamp of quality, predictability and connection to others in their news fare is why I think news brands, developed in the print age, can survive and flourish, even as the delivery mechanisms become increasingly digital. TIME may indeed cease to be a paper product, but I think it will still be here in some form 20 or 50 years from now.

Nevertheless, I fear the electronification of news through the explosion of digital outlets, both video and Web based, is corroding the quality of the two-way discourse between news producers and news consumers in interesting ways. In fact, those very terms - "consumers" and "producers" - capture some of the degradation implicit in making news a kind of data commodity, which I think it is indeed tending to become.

For the mega-companies, which produce both news and entertainment, like my own Time Warner or Disney/ABC, it's a lot cheaper to put up TV news programs and Web sites employing journalists - although a lot of these Web sites are being closed down because they don't make very much money, as was discussed before - than to make sitcoms and hit movies. So there's now a big supply of news-based programming, which needs filling 24 hours a day. This has been a real career opportunity for journalists who need to be called at short notice to be experts on all sorts of subjects. But the winners, the ones whom the TV producers invite back, tend - I will be provocative - to be the glib and provocative. Celebrity, defined as the quality of being famous for being famous, pays for journalists in ways it never used to. In general, I think the effects of this are harmful to restraint and balance upon which the journalist's side of the social contract, implicit in press freedom, is based.

Info-tainment is increasingly what people are happy to see and we to produce. McLaughlin is the highest-rated talking head show, because it's the most pugnacious. The TV news divisions are being run much more for contributions to the bottom line, not that they're vast, rather than as a quasi-public trust, which they used to be. Which has meant less foreign news, less hard news, more soft and fuzzy news. That's not all bad, to be sure. A lot of it's quite interesting programming, and important. But in news, as in our national life, there's a definite trend to giving people what polling says they want rather than to make them eat their vegetables. The lines between the serious press and tabloid TV and newspapers are blurring, both in the subject matters that we cover and how we are all perceived as one indistinguishable nasty blob by the public.

There will always be niche markets for old-fashioned quality, but overwhelmingly I think the landscape is shifting in favor of sizzle. Look at the amazing rehabilitation of Dick Morris, whose previous lies and immaturity and altogether strangeness haven't stopped him from being widely sought on TV; in fact, it makes him quite attractive. Notoriety does pay. Or Matt Drudge, who was discussed earlier at some length, who's a kind of news hustler, whose fame comes from pushing stuff on the Internet which is often not his and often not right, but still the editors of Vanity Fair and George and other arbiters of coolness think he's really something. And he has a contract with MSNBC, as I recall.

To my mind, the discourse on TV shows and also in issue forums on the Web, usually lead nowhere. To my mind, dialogue in a democracy should lead someplace, not just verbal two-by-fours. And I think in the long run this bread-and-circuses atmosphere confuses people about what real journalists do, and it hurts public trust in what journalism creates, even while people can't get enough of it. In fact, I think celebrity culture, which is amplified by the electronic media, is corrupting many professions that acquire social privileges in return for a presumption of independent judgment. You can see this among Wall Street stock analysts, who are quoted often in my outfit and many others as kind of dispassionate sages, while they're actually promoting companies in the hopes of attracting their investment banking business. Or magazine editors who give celebrities control over pictures and layout and even the text of interviews and text of articles written about them. Or lawyers, as we see in the Monica Lewinsky case, who are actively angling for TV contracts, I can report, even while they are allegedly representing their clients. All of the professions are scoring lower in public opinion polls, not that polls should be always the measure of everything. I think journalists are just about at rock bottom, next to Congresspeople - 60 to 70 percent disapproved consistently of the way we were handling Monica Lewinsky, right up there with Ken Starr, although we sure sold a lot of magazines.

I think a lot of our electronic and entertainment culture is indeed seized with a race to the bottom that the proponents of the Internet and this wonderful cornucopia of opportunities on television just really haven't quite coped with, even though there are Net nannies and there are great programs and wonderful things out there for kids and for other people who don't want to participate in the race to the bottom. But I think the values that are most consistently promoted by the entertainment industry, and in some sense also by the electronic media more generally, are consumption, coolness and sex -- which are interrelated - and not delayed gratification and the joy of hard accomplishment.

I am the parent of an 11- and a 9-year-old and a 4-year-old. And I find it takes remarkable vigilance in my non-work life to try to counteract this culture. You can't shut it out entirely - at least that's not the choice I've made, although we are now in fact trying a no-TV month, just to see how that works out. But I find I'm constantly having to be a counter, kind of, guide, a nanny, which takes a lot of time, a very interesting amount of time, to try to get all this stuff to engage their critical faculties, so that they know how they're being sold, or that the values being promoted in those pictures of the impossibly skinny models are not positive, or to encourage them to love reading rather than to love watching.

We can see in fundamentalist movements the world over, from Iran to Gary Bauer, a serious fear of what modernity does to traditional values and family ties. We all agree on the desirability of escaping peasanthood, but some of those values are important and are deeply rooted, even if people perhaps are going to change the nature of those ties in the next generation. I'm reminded of the interview given by the Ayatollah Khomeini to Arianna Fallaci, in which he denounced Western music because it "destructs our youth" and was asked, "Even the music of Bach, Beethoven and Verdi?" "I do not know those names," he replied. I'm sure that was an honest answer. And I can also report that those are not the first composers chosen by my children.

Our collective notion of family life is no doubt idealized, but the premise that you should protect your children from the mess of adult life until they're somehow capable of handling it is pretty widely accepted, I think. And the Internet brings that mess right into your home, pervasively and attractively, and so does all this video cornucopia.

I think it's interesting that Republicans are preparing to attack Vice President Gore in the 2000 campaign precisely because he has wrapped himself in the Internet and wiring every classroom. It's not just because they're going to call the levy that's soon to show up on your phone bill the Gore Tax. They think, and they have polling to back them up, that they can appeal to all the soccer moms worried about their kids finding junk and bad influences on the Internet. Now I think the Democrats will be able to make this look like Luddism that will be counterproductive in a globalizing economy. But I must report my own preliminary but depressing conclusion based on my own family life, that video and Web worlds, which have so many riches for those who can learn to use them, seem so regularly inimical to the intellectual and moral development of the next generation. Thank you.