Most reporters think that the average reader is totally in the dark about the rules of the journalism game. After the Washington Post fired one of its bloggers last week, readers would be justified in concluding that they know more about the rules than the journalists do.

Everybody likes a good story, the kind with a beginning, a middle, and a satisfying end. To be satisfying, the end need not be happy. But it has to mean something. Not that every story needs a moral, as such. But it should have a coherent theme, so that it isn’t just a hodge-podge of unrelated incidents.

Once I was a news producer. Now I am a news consumer. It’s been a tough transition. Being a reporter is a cross between of being in the Mafia and being a human racehorse: once a member of the Media Tribe, it’s hard to disaffiliate—and once the speed and thrill of news gathering is in your DNA, the advent of any major news event jangles your neurons like the clang of a racetrack starting bell.

In the frenzy to reinvent journalism, a couple of fundamental realities about the production and consumption of news seem to be getting lost amid all the commotion of our blogging, tweeting, linking-in, facebooking, and more recently, going mobile. The first is that mainstream media, particularly the institution formerly known as print, supplies virtually all the reportorial journalism of civic decision-making. The other is that local TV – and its visual story telling – remains the most popular way to consume news and information.