Maybe it was the broken phone line.

Since relocating the home office from an apartment closet to an actual room in a house on April 1, I've been without a dial tone. No e-mail, no wasted hours of reading chaff on the Web, and no knowledge of the Inside.com collapse, the cash crunch at Suck/Plastic, the death of Brill's All Star Newspaper and all the other allegedly important New Media stories. Like a bum, I had to go to a hotel to get online.

This month's media news came to me via the Oral Tradition, during the opening night reception of the UC Berkeley conference. It was strange, hearing trade gossip from actual people -- often the actual people involved in the turmoil.

Strange, because it felt like a real journalism conference or awards night, catching up over Paul Grabowicz' delicious stock of wine, trying to figure out who was who in the nametag-free crowd, shivering in the cruel Bay Area spring.

The keynote panel went right over my head. Yes, Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe started a popular magazine and Wired had an impact on the coverage of personal technology and the Internet. But was it akin to the Russian Revolution, as Rossetto said? Um, sure ... if Maxim is akin to the Renaissance. We got some new stuff in the last few years. It's been good, as has DirecTV and home delivery of the New York Times in Los Angeles and laser surgery for the eyeballs, but it really hasn't revolutionized much of anything beyond convenience.

Meaning, it's nice to not have to put on your glasses in the morning, and it's good to screw your local cable monopoly by putting a little dish on the roof, and it's pleasant to read a decent newspaper outside of New York. But will anybody be inspired by these minor comforts in 2101?

The next morning, glancing at my notes while eating breakfast and missing the first session of the day, I realized something with wider implications than Pacific Bell's inability to move basic phone service 11 blocks up the street. The 'After the Fall' conference felt like a real journalism event because everybody was talking about layoffs and hiring freezes and shutdowns.

Until the dot-com bubble, that's the only business reporters and editors ever talked about. Otherwise, people in this trade talked about stories, pictures, scandals, scoops. The surest way to ferret out a business-side interloper at a cocktail reception -- besides the fancy clothes -- was to hear words like 'revenue' and 'profit.' Maybe that's na?ve, but it used to work just fine.

Michael Cieply, Inside.com's LA editor and one of three West Coast survivors of the Brill's deal, illustrated the old-school trade talk by comparing reporting to heroin addiction. Cieply co-wrote a fine book on the Hearst Dynasty and knows a bit about the ebb and flow of publishing money, and his unfashionable defense of the pure fun of newspaper work was in pleasant contrast to the biz-happy talk of last year's conference. Theta Pavis of TechnoPhilly.com was another welcome voice for just doing journalism because it's worth doing.

This doesn't mean editorial people can't be aware of the business side. And they should be happy to root for their paper or magazine or whatnot. But the days of staff reporters discussing their portfolios and luxury homes may finally be over. Thank the Lord.

I'm not going to get into a play-by-play of the conference, even if that's the reason I was sent there. Thanks to USC's talented video team, the whole thing has been captured for your online viewing pleasure. And the conference was filled with journalists, many of whom have already posted good articles on whatever was said.

The good part of these journalistic parties is always the non-official stuff -- the late-night drinking sessions, the non-scripted asides over coffee, the gossip between sessions. I didn't hear all of it, but what I heard bodes well for journalism. Not user-generated content or click-and-buy coverage but plain old journalism.

My new pal Tim Cavanaugh, editor and chief writer for Suck.com, eloquently slurred through about 19 pitchers of Guinness as he articulated this point. I didn't take notes, but his speech the next day was a perfectly distilled version of that barroom rant:

'I'll consider myself unsuccessful when I've put myself out of a job and users are doing all the content creation,' Cavanaugh said at the Co-Creation and Community panel. 'Somebody has to be out there generating something every day and somebody has to be paid for it.'

Bemoaning the 'standup comedy mode of publishing' where stories are valuable only when they provoke a bunch of egotistical amateur writers to post a comment, Cavanaugh criticized the desperate dot-com tactic of making readers be the writers and compared user-generated content to that filthy scene in 'Being John Malkovich' when Malkovich himself enters the alternate world where everybody is Malkovich, and all they can do is say their name to each other.

During the weeks without a phone line, I enjoyed all sorts of non-interactive media. The radio is pretty good, with NPR and Marketplace and Phil Hendrie. Teevee is fine, especially with 200 channels beamed to your roof for the cost of a meal out. And newspapers do a good job of telling you the local stuff nationally focused Web sites would never mention, like the very important mayoral election in the nation's second-biggest city. (Newspapers also have useful advertising, unlike Web sites -- I could read Salon.com forever and still not know about the wine sale at the corner Vons.)

And through this non-interactive interlude, I was reminded that community-generated comments and no-employee content sites will never replace a cub reporter sitting through a city council meeting and diluting four hours of gibberish into eight inches of copy that will make sense to a drowsy human trying to gulp down his coffee while glancing at the paper, or maneuvering through traffic while listening to news radio. The journalist's job is to sift through the press releases and meetings and non-events and tell us where the news is. Sure, the non-journalist can go to the meeting, too -- or watch it on the Web, live. But who has that kind of time?

No matter how low the journalist remains on the public's Trust Meter, at best he or she provides a valuable filter service. They go through the hundred police reports and find the weird stuff. They thumb through 400-page Environmental Impact Reports to see what the new Garbage Factory might do to a specific neighborhood. They watch movies we would never see, just to warn us. Like a good cop or a good plumber or a good jet pilot, they deal with details for the general good.

Huzzah to the Web for providing activists with a way to disseminate their own research and work, outside of corporate structure -- and provide subjective sources on all sorts of crucial news. But as long as people have jobs and families and an interest in what happens in their town and the world at large, those who cover news as a career will provide a service for those who have better things to do.

Nick Denton -- a respected journalist for the Economist and the Financial Times prior to his creation of Moreover.com -- responded to Michael Cieply's passionate defense of journalism by saying, 'That's why we employ software, not journalists.'

But my friend Nick knows that his news-aggregate service cannot exist without the journalism made by his partners' publications.

As Cavanaugh put it, in describing Suck's role in providing editorial fodder for Plastic.com's community of generators, 'There has to be something to talk about ... We give them something to talk about.'