Because things just magically appear on the interwebz, right?  Also, please note the irony of a journalism professor commenting on the substance of this story without actually having read the writings in question. (WSJ subscriber-only, so no link.)

Before 'Watergate' Could be Googled

The Internet is no substitute for hands-on reporting.

Here's a great topic for news junkies: "Watergate 4.0: How Would the Story Unfold in the Digital Age?" Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein gave their assessment at the annual American Society of News Editors conference this month by referring to how Yale students answer a similar question assigned in an advanced journalism class.

Mr. Woodward said he was shocked by how otherwise savvy students thought technology would have changed everything. "I came as close as I ever have to having an aneurysm," he said, "because the students wrote that, 'Oh, you would just use the Internet" and the details of the scandal would be there. The students imagined, as Mr. Woodward put it, "that somehow the Internet was a magic lantern that lit up all events."

As Washington Post reporters, Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein broke the Watergate story in the early 1970s thanks to shoe-leather journalism, including the source known as "Deep Throat," whom Mr. Woodward famously met in a parking garage (and who was revealed more than 30 years later to have been Mark Felt, associate director of the FBI). They were aghast that bright students would assume that all facts could be found online. "The truth resides with people," said Mr. Woodward, meaning "human sources" who disclose confidential information.

To some journalism experts, that seemed so obvious that they doubted the essays were real. "I don't believe this anecdote about moronic Yale students that Bob Woodward used to illustrate how clueless young people are today about journalism," posted New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen on Facebook. "It sounds made-up or very, very distorted."

The Yale course is taught by Steven Brill, the founder of American Lawyer and Court TV (and my business partner in Press+, an e-commerce technology now owned by RR Donnelley). He confirms that every year, almost every student in the highly selective course writes that Watergate could now be reported without actual reporting. "To a person," Mr. Woodward wrote to Mr. Brill after reading the essays, "your students have what I can only call a heart-stopping over-confidence in the quality of the information on the Internet."

Another student wrote that "with the advancements in the technology of the Internet," it "would be simple to track down the $50,000 that were withdrawn from the intelligence-gathering fund." Another speculated that "the online community would have gone into a tweeting frenzy."

Why would bright students think they could simply do a Google search for "Watergate"? Mr. Woodward told me last week that the "magic lantern" phrase came to him after reading one of the Yale essays as saying, in effect: "Just go to the Internet and Google '$50,000 secret fund' and somehow details of a hidden criminal conspiracy would be there."

He contrasted the reporting goal of "advancing the story and providing new information" with using the Web to find or distribute already-known facts.

He also doubted that "tweeting and blogging would have created an immediate avalanche of public opinion." It took more than two years between the Watergate break-in and Richard Nixon's resignation, including special prosecutors, Senate hearings and a Supreme Court order to the White House to turn over secret tapes.

Mr. Woodward concludes that the Internet is "not that magic and it doesn't always shine that bright." It's a great tool for research, including for linking data that before might have been public but was hard to put together. It's easier now to connect donors to politicians, for example, due to mandated online disclosure. The Pulitzer Prizes to be awarded this week will likely include online-only journalism, which became eligible only in 2008.

But at a time when the federal government is only getting bigger and state and local governments are so badly mismanaged, the Web is still no substitute for old-fashioned reporting. The American Society of News Editors tracks the number of print and online journalists at newspapers, which still do most of the original reporting. Alas, the number of reporters is down by some 30% from its peak and is lower than it was in the 1970s.

Mr. Rosen, the journalism professor, apologized to Mr. Woodward for commenting online before reviewing excerpts from what the Yale students had written. He agreed they put too much faith in the Web.

He ultimately updated his Facebook account with a post saying: "In big works of journalism the truth that needs to get out usually lies with human sources" and not with documents already somehow online. "The Internet can help, but it is not some 'magic lantern' that illuminates everything."