Howell Raines was executive editor of The New York Times* from 2001 to 2003.*

Back in 1999, I was at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank in St. Petersburg, Florida, when Jim Romenesko was introduced as Poynter's newest hire. Sandy Rowe, editor of the Oregonian, in Portland, was there too, along with a venerable prof from Columbia’s journalism school. As ink-stained traditionalists, we were aflutter about Poynter president Jim Naughton's nervy decision to hire an obscure gossip blogger to increase traffic on Poynter's dignified website. Poynter called our little group of visiting editors its advisory board, which meant we got a free trip to sunny Tampa Bay every January. Little did we suspect that in the person of Romenesko, a shy journalism nerd from Wisconsin, we were looking at the future—or at least the next decade.

I found Romenesko recently, where he begins every day, in his home office. Since he inhabits a virtual world, it was a virtual interview. I watched the famously reclusive blogger on my computer via an iChat video hookup that let him see me as I asked questions about the death of American newspapers. Romenesko described how his inspiration, circa 1998—to link up all the journalists in America on a blog originally called MediaGossip—had made him a cloistered digital monk, rising at 5 a.m. every day to begin doggedly posting tidbits of journalism-related news gleaned from other websites (he looks at more than 100 sites a day). A true obsessive, he quit taking vacations because he knew his second-guessing would drive any stand-in editor crazy. In the early days, he read some print newspapers every morning, but like the rest of America, he got over it: "They can stack up for a week plus, and maybe on a weekend, I'll finally get to them."

Romenesko quickly found himself living a lonely-guy existence. "I was basically stuck in my apartment," he says. “I would find myself at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, still in my bathrobe." This way of life grew from his hunch about the future of social interaction. "The first time I really sampled the internet, in 1989," he says, "I knew this would be a culture-changing force, and I wanted to be part of it."

So did the disgruntled newsies who quickly discovered that by having Romenesko post their internal memos they could manipulate their bosses. Poynter had retitled Romenesko's "one-man show," as he calls his site, to remove the noxious word gossip. In short order, Bill Mitchell, the director of Poynter Online who first spotted Romenesko, said that his new star helped Poynter surpass the journalism reviews as the place where professionals get their "news about news." The site soared to ever-greater prominence after 9/11, Romenesko says, and by "following little dramas in journalism, like the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times." Ouch! It's true that the late Gerald Boyd and I, then the top two editors at the Times, were among the first to get Romenesko'd out of our jobs. According to Roy Peter Clark, the senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, the verb form of Romenesko's name quickly established itself as journalistic shorthand for getting zapped, often fatally, by unflattering publicity. I never really blamed the messenger. Since then, however, hard times have hit the newspaper business, and today, many editors are doing just that, grousing that Romenesko's blog at poynter.org feeds gloom and doom in the nation's newsrooms with its instantaneous reporting of layoffs, declining ad revenues, and fire-sale prices being paid for metropolitan dailies.

Romenesko himself sees the irony. With typical Midwestern modesty, he says he didn't set out to create a media-economics monitoring service but rather a national "community of journalists" for "people like me who are obsessed with newspapers." That his site has become a high-tech tom-tom for angst-ridden members of a dying tribe was merely a side effect. In a sense, Romenesko is both the medium and the message. Newspaper publishers assumed that even if the printing press disappeared, the internet would still have an insatiable need for their basic product—verified facts, hierarchically arranged by importance. But Romenesko's rapid growth showed that even newsrooms are part of the emerging market for an unprocessed sprawl of information, delivered immediately and with as few filters as possible between the fingertips of one laptop user and the eyeballs of another. In short, it's not technology per se that’s killing newspapers; it’s plummeting demand for quality information.

That's the big picture for journalism and Romenesko. They are both being done in by large impersonal forces like the commoditization of news, accelerated obsolescence, mutating news values, and what happens when newspapers try to wring 21st-century profits from the 18th-century technique of transporting, by cart and hand, individualized packages of words on paper. So there was something vaguely Conradian about the video image of Romenesko’s apartment and his soft pleasant features, and his obviously sincere devotion to words on paper that came through my laptop's tiny speaker. It's not that either of us was mumbling about "the horror, the horror." But we are both survivors of the print era destined to be bucked off the same bronco of change. Some of us and our papers are already history. I'm not sure Romenesko has yet grasped that the informational storm he unleashed a decade ago is already undermining his prominence as the most famous trade name in media blogging.

Right now, though, life is good. Romenesko is Poynter's highest-paid nonexecutive employee, at more than $170,000 a year. The advent of WiFi has freed him from his one-bedroom apartment in Evanston, Illinois. By 6 a.m, he's dressed and off to the Starbucks across the street, drinking coffee and multitasking on his MacBook Air. He also runs Starbucks Gossip, an independent blog about the company, a job that "pays for my coffee and maybe a sandwich." Then he moves to other WiFi-enabled spots, notably the Unicorn, a café crowded with "old fogies like me reading newspapers" and Northwestern University students munching sandwiches and staring at their computer screens. "I like to think they don’t see me as a dinosaur site," Romenesko says when I suggest that he, like print newspapers, has an aging readership, and the kids are probably not on his blog. Indeed, there are signs that younger journalists are looking elsewhere for trade news that is intentionally satirical and loaded with political spin and contempt for the bosses.

One site of choice these days is Gawker, which promises "media gossip and pop culture round the clock." Gawker now reaches an audience several times larger than Romenesko's and has paid backhanded tributes to "mild-mannered Jim Romenesko, who runs the most feared blog in journalism (except for this one)." Gawker has also needled the pioneer of its craft about his Starbucks gig, and its readers tend to speak of Romenesko more as a historical figure than a must-read. "I don’t feel obligated to check it daily since a lot of the news doesn’t directly relate to me," says a young New York-based reporter at a major newspaper. "I think Romenesko is what Gawker would look like if it had morals. It's basically a newspaper on newspapers and provides a great top-line summary for a dying industry—an invaluable tool for that master's thesis 20 years from now on the fall of paper."

Even without such scholarship, we know that the internet chews up content faster than print or broadcasting, and more impersonally. The swift rise and incipient eclipse of Romenesko illustrates what a quick trip it is from guru to geezer in cyberspace, and the Manhattan buzz is that Gawker, too, has already peaked. Traditionalist critics view Romenesko as the guy who opened the first and biggest hole in the sacred wall between news and gossip in reporting about the media. The newer media blogs, however, see him as being confined by passé, self-imposed rules, such as his steady refusal to make his own website into a political soapbox and post the most extreme commentators from the alternative press. Given my age, I tend to regard Romenesko's legitimation of gossip as unfortunate and his devotion to the tradition of fairness as noble. There's a word for these kinds of distinctions between the tawdry state of today's journalism and the golden age of immutable values: quaint.

In little more than a century, journalism has been conducted under a variety of short-lived labels. Yellow journalism begat objective journalism, which begat investigative journalism, which begat advocacy journalism. To some of us, the New Journalism looked like a destination, but that was before the passage through gossip journalism to our next stop: fact-free journalism.

The fogies are in an uproar about the internet's glorification of opinions from a nation of bloggers sitting around, figuratively speaking, in Romenesko's old bathrobes. Oregonian editor Sandy Rowe, one of the more original thinkers at a legacy newspaper, counsels us to ignore the "journalistic tizzy fit of righteous indignation." We were never as careful with facts as we claimed to be before Romenesko's great leap, which she defines as "the whole notion of the viral broadcast of often unverified information." According to Rowe, the instant peer review that Romenesko has instituted by nationalizing newspaper shoptalk has two sides: "At its worst, it stifles creativity, makes executives risk-averse, and wastes valuable time and energy," Rowe said in an e-mail exchange in which we shared memories about the day we met Romenesko. "Advantages: It's fast, it's free, it's efficient, and sometimes it's even correct.”

I would simply add that you should read Romenesko while you can. He won't be around forever, but his contribution will last. I’m not talking about his wholesaling of newsroom gossip; I'm talking about his trailblazing business model, succeeding where the websites of major newspapers have pretty much failed. That is, he's proven that speedily aggregated, often unsubstantiated information is marketable. Both the Huffington Post and the investors behind Tina Brown's proposed aggregation site are also betting on that.

Because Romenesko is an online pioneer with old-fashioned newspaper values, he chose to do it in a nonprofit environment, but money can be made with his formula. That's why Poynter has steadily boosted his pay and why Roy Peter Clark and others at the institute are anxious that an internet giant like Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo will soon dangle a big salary in front of him to shift-key his daily bundle of nearly 100,000 unique visitors over to its website. Poynter comforts itself with the thought that Romenesko didn’t found MediaGossip back in the dawn of the digital era with the idea of becoming rich. But like the rest of us, he might not mind wealth if it plopped into his lap. He wisely declined a 2002 job offer from Steven Brill, founder of the now defunct Brill's Content. With the velocity of creative destruction in the information industry ever increasing, though, I say this to the Monk of Evanston about the next time the big dogs come sniffing around: Take the money.