News to you?

If you believe what you read in the blogosphere, the days of newspapers and other traditional media are numbered. Our news will come not on dead trees or via broadcast airwaves, but instead in a digital rainfall of information from thousands, nay, millions, of bloggers and new media outlets. In fact, that’s already happening.

But is it? Not according to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Instead, what Pew discovered in a review of where news originates was that traditional media are producing the vast majority of the news — 96 percent in Pew’s study of one market.

The market was Baltimore and here’s the tally of where the news came from in the week of July 19-25, 2009: 61 percent from newspapers, 28 percent from TV and 7 percent from radio. That left the remainder to “New Media” and that remainder was . . . (drum roll, please) . . . 4 percent.

Truth is, despite the barrage of negative news about the dinosaur mediums, newspapers and TV stations are the employers of 90-plus percent of the paid journalists in this country. And – what do you know? — turns out that the vast, vast majority of news is produced by people who are paid, rather than bloggers working out of a spare bedroom.

The Pew report was not all good news for newspapers. The Baltimore Sun, for instance, was producing 32 percent fewer stories than it did in 1999 (layoffs and downsizing tend to have that effect on story quantity). TV newscasts were notable not for their depth, but rather for their heavy focus on the old standby: If it bleeds, it leads.

The study also does not mean that new media forms are not having an impact. In fact, many of the stories broken by newspaper and TV reporters were first released on the Web. And these days, the companies’ Twitter feeds might give their own Web sites a run for their money.

But the information gathering, researching, writing and editing for those digital forms of news are still originating from paid professionals. If the New Media gurus think they are going to replace Traditional Media, they had better figure out how to pay them. For the most part, that’s not happening now. If that doesn’t change and New Media is our information source, we will undoubtedly get what we paid for.