Tom Brokaw. Photo: Paul Schmelzer

New media is replacing old media at a pace that threatens traditional journalistic values Americans rely on, Tom Brokaw told a gathering of Minnesota journalists Thursday night. ”We’re constantly behind the curve,” he said of the news industry’s sluggishness to adjust. “It needs to happen quickly.” Blogging in the current “Thomas Paine environment” is not journalism, he said. “Most of the ‘journalism’ on the Internet is aggregation.”

Brokaw said he sees a “great generational divide [over] why journalism is important and how journalism can affect lives.” He didn’t have to go back as far as his vaunted “Greatest Generation” to find examples. Citing 1960s civil-rights struggles, he said, “Mississippi has been transformed by journalism. … The war in Vietnam became an issue in America because of brave, young journalists.”

With Watergate, “journalism unraveled one of the greatest scandals,” he said: “A sitting president engaged in felonious behavior.” In the midst of that scandal, Brokaw said he remembers often saying, “It doesn’t make sense,” to which a colleague would reply, speaking of President Nixon: “Not until you remember he’s guilty.” (“But we didn’t say that on the air,” Brokaw recalled — not until the smoking gun of incriminating audio tapes.)

Brokaw made his remarks at an awards banquet held by the state chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Brokaw’s speech moved from nostalgia for the newsgathering of old to an indictment of new media today. Would civil rights advances, Vietnam protests, or Nixon’s downfall have happened, wondered Brokaw, “were any of these events left to the bloggers or people who Twitter?”

“I don’t know how many of the traditional forms of journalism will survive,” he warned, likening the industry’s economics to the “gas mileage on a Hummer.” A key mistake was letting the “young pioneers” of the Internet think that “information is free,” he said. “We were much too slow to respond … too unimaginative. … We stuck too long to our conceits and our conventions.”

Brokaw doesn’t know how to save what he calls “this great enterprise” of journalism, but he mentioned a few ideas he likes.

“New consortiums” could form to cover Congress. A public service ad campaign could remind people why journalism is important. He called Kindle-type electronic-reader machines “a slight light at the end of the tunnel.”

What won’t work, in Brokaw’s opinion: micropayments, or reliance on the old adage, “Just print the news and raise Hell.”

The former NBC Evening News anchorman had good material for localizing his speech. Brokaw said as a girl his mother, now 92, lived at 3517 Portland Ave. S. in Minneapolis. His observation on visiting the street: “Obviously, the neighborhood has changed a little bit since then.”

He sold and delivered the Minneapolis Tribune (and the Sunday Star and Tribune) as a boy in South Dakota, starting in 1953 — “when they were beginning the Franken-Coleman recount,” he quipped.

That job once earned him the prize of a trip to Minneapolis. But two later attempts to get work as a newsman here failed, leaving Brokaw in what he termed “the lonely wilderness of journalists who could not make it in the Twin Cities.”

He said he was inspired by America’s “two planets in the sky” — network news anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley of NBC and Walter Cronkite of CBS. On Election Night 1960, “I made a pact with myself that I would become a network [newscaster],” he said. “I overwished,”

But someone up there liked him and his overwish was granted. Brokaw helmed NBC’s flagship news show for 21 years, topping off a career that included a three-year stint as White House correspondent during the Watergate era.

Today Brokaw works on occasional news documentaries and gives a lot of speeches. His talk Thursday night quoted from a past speech he gave at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. He had just come from a talk in Tulsa by way of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, where he serves on the board of trustees directors. He’ll give commencement addresses Saturday at Fordham University and Sunday at the College of William and Mary. (Last year it was Stanford University.)

At one point, Brokaw recalled covering a meeting of the East German Communist Party shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall — “in a room quite this.”

Whether he intended to draw a parallel between the representatives of the doomed government of East Germany he saw then and those from the collapsing news industry he was addressing wasn’t clear.

Via The UpTake (which was honored at the SPJ awards event for its use of video), here’s a video clip of the last part of Brokaw’s speech and a question-and-answer period that followed.