Mort Rosenblum is a journalism professor at the University of Arizona. He worked as a foreign correspondent for 40 years.

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PARIS

Soon after JFK was shot, as Vietnam got ugly, I dropped my University of Arizona journalism classes to be inaugurated as president of Venezuela.

The Caracas Daily Journal had offered me a job, and I showed up during elections. My professors' dictum rang fresh and clear: Reporters get close to their story.

I stuck close to the new president, and when he addressed cheering masses from the Miraflores Palace balcony, I got shoved out there next to him.

That was heady stuff for a 20-year-old dropout. But circumstances soon reminded me of what else my professors said: Reporters have to know what they're talking about.

I went home to finish my degree, report for the Star, and learn to run a copy desk at the Associated Press before heading overseas again.

With all of today's electronic razzle-dazzle, nothing basic has changed since then or, in fact, since reporters chipped their dispatches on cave walls:

● You can't cover a story without being there, or at least being close enough to smell its breath.

● But being there is not enough. Reporting requires essential skills, an acquired sense of fairness, and the ability to set events into their broader contexts.

And now, in a dangerous world when reporting matters more than ever, these two fundamentals are being pushed aside.

"Citizen journalists" are great for sounding alarms and adding details as old-style tipsters have always done. But I would shy away from, say, a citizen dentist.

Alan Weisman, with whom I teach journalism at the University of Arizona, wrote in this space a few months ago about why we need more skilled foreign correspondents.

He was dead right. More reporters up close, for instance, would have spared Iraqis and everyone else a world-altering war that is by no means about to be over.

Responsible reporting by skilled professionals is also under serious threat at home.

In Web chatter, many pose a basic question: Do we really need "the media" now that we all so interconnected? In a word, yes.

Real reporting, with editors and expense accounts and time to dig, amounts to the steady beam of headlights. The other stuff is like a strobe that illuminates sporadically.

While the latter is extremely useful, the former is preferable when you are hurtling down a dark road at night.

No catchall "media" is the culprit. Some news outlets stink. Yet plenty of good reporters work in the mainstream and in fresh alternative tributaries..

Our worst threat is apathy, even hostility, from a citizenry that desperately needs comprehensive and reliable reporting in a world that is about to eat our lunch.

Why were we surprised by a housing downturn and a market crash? Will we wait until only air spurts out of our water taps to think seriously about waste and climate change?

Any real reporter knows that major crises are foreshadowed by months, if not decades, of ominous signs. Subtle signs elude headlines or TV screen crawls.

When I look back at what my Star colleagues and I wrote in the 1960s, and what others did later, it is all there.

Carle Hodge hammered on about threatened desert ecology. Jane Kay exposed poisons leaching into the water supply from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. And so much more.

Air Force officers just back from Vietnam told me at length how a war starting there could not be won. Editors put that on the front page.

Few small parts of the big picture are dramatic scoops for branders to brag about. But news is not a saleable commodity. It is the daily drip-drip that informs us.

Here are a few ideas:

● Look for reporting you respect and support the people who provide it. Buy the paper, or contribute, even if it's free on line. Someone has to go get the news.

● Take charge. Tell editors when they do well; let them know when they do not.

● React when authorities trample your right to know. Did anyone go after those cops who smacked around reporters at the Denver and St. Paul political conventions?

● Look for new ways to get seriously briefed on issues that matter. (Disclosure: I edit "Dispatches," which attempts this.) A lot of frustrated journalists offer alternatives.

● Find the time to read, watch and listen. If you don't, saying there is no good reporting is like complaining of hunger pangs but not bothering to open the refrigerator.

What can be more crucial than data that helps us vote wisely, shape a fair economy, fight poverty, make friends, thwart enemies and save the planet for our kids?

In the end, better coverage must be up to citizens who consume news.