The Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias wrote Tuesday about the weekend encounter between herself, four young journalists -- and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.

Here's an excerpt:

He clearly had expected the reporters gathered on a slow news Sunday to ask about the White House, but we have different questions on our minds. Like what he thinks of how the media has covered Bush's wars.

"Impatience, speed tend to dominate everything," he replied in his distinctive drawl and disjointed sentences. "Cable news, the Internet. I always find that you do better work if you spend weeks, months, even years on something. There's not a tendency in the media to do that now. In Watergate we could work weeks on a story. After the Iraq war started, the Post gave me a full year to find out why we went to war and what happened. I think we are continually rushing for the incremental advance (but) we have to get to the bottom of things.

"I have to give us an incomplete ..."

A few things have changed in the more than 30 years since the Watergate heyday of Woodward and his reporting partner Carl Bernstein.

Along with the technological changes that have infinitesmally speeded up the news cycle, the number of journalists working has generally dropped as newspaper companies sought to keep their profit margins up.

In the November Columbia Journalism Review editorial:

According to Morton Research Inc., John Morton’s Maryland media consulting firm, the weighted average of profit margins for the newspaper divisions of major media companies was 13 percent in 1991. It had climbed to nearly 20 percent last year — more than double the average profit margin of the Fortune 500.

Much of that has come from relentless cost-cutting, which means shedding reporters and editors.

Doing complex investigative or explanatory journalism takes a high level of skill on the part of the individual journalist -- but it also takes time.

One way to keep costs down is to keep the story count per reporter high. The old Thomson papers were famous for this. Reporters had to file 20 column-inches of copy per day. The situation got so absurd, some people would keep reaction out of one day's story so they've have some copy in reserve for the next day's paper.

Anyway, if you have to file two or three stories per day, the depth you can go into any given story is obviously self-limiting.

Woodward works for a paper that's still essentially controlled by the Graham family. Actually, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are controlled by families. While they clearly aren't immune from the structural economic pressures affecting the industry, one could fairly argue they have remained fundamentally committed to good journalism and have been willing to accept slightly lower margins that purely publicly-traded, profit-driven companies simply can't.

For a good case study of the economics-vs.-journalism debate, read Fault Line: Can The Los Angeles Times Survive Its Owners, by Ken Auletta in the Oct. 10, 2005 issue of the New Yorker.

Here's an anecdote about Scott Smith, the president of Tribune Publishing. The Tribune Co. purchased the Times Mirror Co., which owns the LAT, from the Chandler family in 2000:

Leo Wolinsky recalls a meeting soon after he (Smith) was appointed. "We were talking about good things we were doing and how we were trying to hire the best people. He said, 'I don't hink you always have to hire the best people.' I was so stunned I didn't follow up. I may be wrong, but I worried that it meant he did not necessarily mean to hire the best. He wanted us to hire the cheapest." Smith denies saying this. Carroll was there, and although he does not recall Smith's words, he recalls that "several things he said caused concern." He also says, referring to Smith, "Every time I mentioned the idea that the Los Angeles Times should be among the four best papers, I had the feeling it made people uncomfortable. Nobody ever said we shouldn't do it. But nobody ever said, Yes, that's a good idea."

Here's some other excerpts (the 'I's and 'me's are Auletta):

Later, I asked Smith how he responds to reporters who ask why a 15-per-cent profit margin isn't enough. He replied, "It's the equivalent of saying, 'I wrote a really good story yesterday, but that's the best I'll ever do.' Our premise is that we can improve." The question is: Improve the paper or improve the profits? ...

(Dennis) FitzSimons (the Tribune Co.'s CEO) said journalists make "too many fake arguments" about how newspaper companies are trying "to dumb down," rather than asking how newspapers can attract new readers. "What's the right balance of entertainment and hard news?" he said. "Publishing a paper that just we like maybe isn't enough in this environment. We have to be more to what consumers want." ...

"It's not our job to give readers what they want," (Dean) Baquet (the LAT's editor) told me. "What if they don't want war coverage or foreign coverage or to see poverty in their communities? Southern newspapers are still hanging their heads because generations ago they gave readers what they wanted -- no coverage of segregation and the civil rights movement." The job of newspapers, Baquet added, was to help readers understand the world. "If we don't do that, who will?"

So there you have it: Besides changing technology, you have shrinking newsrooms and corporate overlords constantly pushing for ever-higher profit margins to keep stock prices up. That means ever-fewer reporters pushing out ever-more stories. While the effect is more muted for national-level papers, it becomes distinctly more pronounced as one moves down the food chain.

And at some point, it impacts on the quality of the journalism making it out to people -- something that carries some serious ramifications for any society that relies on an informed citizenry.

One shouldn't take that to mean no significant journalism occurs. That would be overstating the case. Besides, big organizations like to do some potentially prize-winning work because it's prestigious and it's useful for public relations purposes. But the resources for solid day-to-day journalism might be constricted instead.

Obviously, one can't cram everything into one column, but I suspect Mr. Woodward would agree with the basic thrust of my argument -- that economic pressures are affecting modern journalism as much, if not more so, than technological shifts.