"Is that the apocalypse, or is it just my TV?"

I love when the media realizes how ridiculous it can be, and calls itself out. Or rather, when print journalists use some of their column inches to verbally roll their eyes at their TV cousins, as TIME's James Poniewozik - author of the title quote - does in the next issue, on newsstands August 10th.

Yes, this probably puts me over my quota of TIME references for the past month, but I had to laugh reading Poniewozik's "Media Freak-outs: Every Week is Shark Week" on the Metro this morning, and couldn't resist passing it along. (He starts with a quote from 30 Rock, but sounds like a professional throughout the column. What better happy medium between pop culture and serious journalism is there?)

In honor of this week being Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, Poniewozik relates our fascination with the fear, awe and occasional hysteria these animals inspire in us to the media's sensationalist treatment of issues that are not, in fact, the crises they're made out to be. "To live every week like it's Shark Week...might be a metaphor for living in our media environment," he says.

[T]o spend every week titillated by unlikely threats, getting whipped into frenzies, yawning over high-minded stuff like health-care policy and supping from the delicious chum bucket of hysteria. The President is a secret Kenyan who faked his birth certificate! Terrorists are coming to get you! And the world is going to end, six different ways! But first a word from our sponsor.

(This is where I started laughing, and attracted some nervous, sideways glances from my fellow Metro riders.)

And Poniewozik is exactly right. A lack of education and comprehensive health care will have a much more - and certainly much longer-lasting - negative impact on your life than the inability to buy your dream home for a time because no bank will lend you the money. But the housing market is where the numbers are crashing and burning, and things that crash and burn are what keep the ratings up. Our education and health care systems have been going up in flames for years; that crisis isn't interesting anymore. At least not interesting enough to convince people to stay tuned for the 11 o'clock news.

I rarely watch actual news broadcasts because I absolutely loathe this kind of mass hysteria-inducing reporting that the ratings game fuels. I frankly don't care what issue makes an anchor pull out their "now this is really, really serious, folks" voice. I want the most up-to-date facts so that I know what's going on in the world (which, like, OMG, so totally does not include the status of Jon and Kate Gosselin's love lives as reported on CNN!), and I want to decide for myself what my reaction is. It's the job of commentators like Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow to comment on the news; a news anchor's job is to report it.

And reporting is important. Even if the day's new record low or high percentage of whatever that the media is screaming about isn't high on my list of things to lose sleep over in the long run, it's still good to know. I could just do without the screaming.

Poniewozik recognizes that the media has gotten off track:

Ideally, the media should help us place our worries in perspective. But often they encourage the disaster mentality by focusing on the trendy menace - the sleeper cell, the Obama-conspiracy e-mails, the pandemic, the shark - jumping on hot-button distractions and rushing to label every new crisis the worst ever.

So in the world of the 24-hour news cycle, ruled by the cable networks, how do we get the media back on track and reporting on the issues that matter in the long-term, not just the crisis du jour?

How are blogging and social media affecting print journalism?

There's the obvious answer, given the closing of Denver's Rocky Mountain News in February and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's switch to online-only reporting in March, although I'd argue that has more to do with online news outlets than blogs and social media. But as bloggers and social networking sites become more mainstream, how else are they effecting print journalism?

My mom has subscribed to TIME Magazine for as long as I can remember, and recently took them up on an offer to send a gift subscription along with her renewal - so now I can look forward to an issue of TIME in my mailbox every Saturday (woo hoo!). My mom usually left her copy open on the kitchen counter and made her way through it as she cooked dinner in the evenings or ate lunch on the weekends, and I remember reading pieces of it from time to time as I was growing up. I felt so adult, reading an article out of a news magazine, and learning bits and pieces about what was going on in the world.

I've been receiving TIME in my own mailbox for about a month now, and really enjoy reading it - usually on the Metro, where it doubles as a fan on the stifling station platforms - but I've found myself blinking in surprise a few times over the writers' use of casual language. Writing tone and style are very individual, but there are basic standards that exist for most types of writing. I had to adapt the way I wrote for Honors English my junior year in high school because my teacher didn't like my style, I learned to take a journalistic, reporting tone when I wrote for GW's The Hatchet and had to shake myself out of a formal, academic style after I graduated and started writing email copy for the non-profit I work for.

As a blogger, everything about how and what I write is up to me. I can be as casual as I want, and most bloggers are, using interjections between hyphens or parentheses (I never do that!) and often writing their own opinion - blogging isn't about presenting the facts with a subtle slant.

So I was surprised when I started noticing the same techniques in TIME, in articles of varying lengths, from features to quick blurbs. In four issues I've only noticed it three or four times, but it's been enough to get me thinking about it: is this an effect of the more casual reader-writer relationship encouraged by blogs and social networking? Or is it just a natural evolution of journalism in a society where much of our interaction with others comes in the form of words on a page or screen?

I don't know that I have an opinion on whether this kind of change is good or bad. I lean toward the bad side of neutral, not because I think it does any harm as an occasional thing but because I don't particularly want professional journalists sounding like...well, me. At least not in columns that involve serious reporting rather than a point of view. I want the facts, along with whatever (hopefully minimal) bias is implicit in the news sources I choose to use, so I can make up my own mind about the issues. And then, of course, I'll inflict my opinions on you!

What do you think - what's the source of these snippets of casual intimacy in reporting, and are they okay or should they be a journalism no-no?