It only takes a brief perusal of the assorted headlines, blog postings and tweets, to see just how much the news industry is struggling with disruptive technologies today.

In pondering all this, I am struck by the relationship between the inherent intervals of various technologies and the ‘newsiness’ of the news. ‘Bringing you breaking news’ has been a long-time value proposition of the news industry but I’m not so sure it can survive.

By way of example, my Twitter feed is truly real-time news. It updates by the second. So fast in fact that I can’t keep up. In many ways its my personally-defined CNN news ticker (even if many of the headlines are obtuse and the TInyURL links blind).

Facebook (as a stand-in for traditional social networks) seems to run at an update interval of ‘a few times a day’. It’s news is hyper-local to me – not geographically but socially. And let’s face it, in this day and age, geography matters less and less in terms of the people we feel connected to.

Blogging seems to walk the line between ‘a few times a day’ to ‘once daily’. The content tends to be longer and better reasoned. Blog topics can also be rather granular so I get a very concrentrated dose of a topic I am interested in.  In short, blog posts have a greater opportunity to be of higher quality than a tweet or even a Facebook update. I may not know the bloggers I follow (so they’re not as ‘local’) but I have chosen them because I like the way they think and write about the topics I am interested in. Often they also feel more ‘authentic’ because I assume (often incorrectly) that they are pro-am writers and not salaried corporate suits.

So in comparison to traditional news sources, Twitter is faster, Facebook is more ‘local’ and blogs have a higher perceived authenticity alongside longer, meatier content.

So what’s left for the commercial news industry to sell that these other guys don’t seem to be better at?

Here I’d point to the YouTube v. Hulu slugfest. While YouTube got a lot of hype (and market valuation) Hulu has actually made money, attracted advertising revenue and demonstrated a longer-term value proposition by focusing on professional calibre content.

Where YouTube saw the Internet as a social technology with media distribution capabilities, Hulu seems to see the Internet as a distribution system with social capabilities. This isn’t symantics, it’s carving out a competitive advantage.

What would happen if the news industry focused less on ‘breaking news’ and more on ‘quality news narratives’? What if the news industry gave up reliance on the audience for fast, endless soundbytes and headlines and focused on reasoned discussion, in-depth analysis and professionally-assembled details. These are all things professional news companies should be able to do better than the UGC set.

If you think about it, a lot of what defines today’s professional news leaders are the people offering the editorial. Think Fox news. Think the op-ed section of the Times. While neither Fox nor the Times can be as fast as twitter or as local as Facebook or as authentic and granularly focused on single topics as the pro-am bloggers I like, it can deliver a production quality and talent base these other media can’t. Plus they’ve got the credentials to get into the right rooms with the right people to tell many types of stories – political, business, celebrity – first-hand.

When Gutenberg invented movable type it enabled anyone to produce text. That didn’t mean everyone’s text was worth reading, only that it could be made and distributed. Music production software has done the same for music. So have Podcasting, camcorders, blogging software, Twitter, etc.

All of these technologies enable anyone to publish. What they don’t do is assure quality. Quite the contrary, they bury us all in a lot of crappy content. For every piece that goes viral, most go nowhere. And a lot of the ‘viral’ stuff is a blip on our radar that vanishes as quickly as it appears offering 15 minutes of fame and then a return to unpaid obscurity.

A professional news provider could still build its reputation on having the best imagery, the best produced video, the most reasoned, well-researched and articulated stories all presented by charismatic talent that resonates with an audience. This news provider would not replace my Twitter stream or my Facebook friends or my blog surfing, but it would be something that, when I got tired of the banality of everyday content, would be stimulating and remarkable.

Social media is a great equalizer – for good and bad. It is highly disruptive and the reality is, the available marketshare for professional news may shrink overall (just like most markets as they mature and consolidate). Some outfits will simply lose and disappear. Others will have to rethink their infrastructure from the ground up if they’re to keep the lights on and their employees paid. But among the millions churning out user generated content something professionally made and remarkable will always find an audience.

Despite our culture’s infatuation with all things user-generated, quality content will always provide value to a well-defined audience whose needs are being met. The trick then is to build a business that can efficiently create that quality content by leveraging all the tools available. Doing this may be ugly work, but such is the nature of adaption.

‘All the news that’s fit to print’ might still be a useful governing principle. The focus must change from ‘all’ (volume and speed) to ‘fit’ (quality and value) and not necessarily assume ‘print’.