RIVER CITY JOURNAL: BON VOYAGE, TIME MAGAZINE -- WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT?

* Heads up, readers. This is really long. But you'll miss the punch line if you wimp out too soon.

This is what I heard after I did my patriotic duty last week and warned Cape Girardeau about the invasion of the TIime Warner Empire:

Gee, Joe, you weren't very nice to our visitors. Don't you like Time magazine?

As it turns out, I'm a longtime subscriber to Time. In the 1960s, I could trust the magazine to engage my interest in news from around the world, news that never grabbed my attention in newspapers or on TV. Time once was famous for its quirky writing, which never inhibited its thoroughness in providing a weekly compendium of just about everything I needed to know.

Alas, Time and other weekly newsmagazines have decided readers are really stupid. They rely on infotainment to boost circulation. All pretense of digesting a week's worth of news has long since evaporated. Special-topic issues now preach from a pulpit whose religious views I do not necessarily embrace.

Frankly, if Time ever decides to muzzle Joel Stein, I'll drop my subscription like a hot potato. Joel's writing is goofy, but it never disappoints. He is so good, in fact, that I wonder why Time keeps an icon of column writing like Calvin Trillin on the payroll.

But the editors of Time didn't ask me, did they?

Now that the Time folks have come and gone, don't you think your alarm was excessive?

How nice it would be to read Time's Fourth of July issue and discover that the visiting reporters, photographers and editors actually came to find out what's on our minds. The short visit during the waning sunlight of Wednesday only reinforced my view that the agenda was set in a New York skyscraper.

This is how I would describe the aftermath of the visit:

The Time Warner Empire navy has launched a Scud at us. Remember Saddam Hussein's missile attacks during the Gulf War? No one knew where the Scuds were. No one knew where they were going. No one knew when they would hit. No one knew if they would explode.

It's clear Time wants to make something out of the Good Hope Street melee of last June. Will we take a big hit? A little hit? No hit at all? We won't know until the Independence Day issue of Time arrives.

Is it Time's hidden agenda you don't like, or do you just think anyone from New York is evil?

"Anyone from New York" is a broad brush. Technically, that includes me, since I lived there and eventually wound up here. I gather many of the Time crew aboard the S.S. Gimmick going down the Mississippi are not native New Yorkers. The skipper, Walter Isaacson, is from New Orleans.

But the whole Time tribe has been in New York long enough to know how silly it looks to go to all the trouble to rent a big boat and float down a river to a town like Cape Girardeau and prick the community's sensitivity about race relations when they all took comfortable airplane rides to get to the river from the most racially divided megalopolis in the world.

And it's not just clear-cut racial lines that dissect the boroughs of New York. It is the invisible wall of isolation that surrounds the place.

For these folks, everything outside New York City is foreign. Newcomers to the city too quickly are synthesized into the culture and the mentality that I attribute to altitude sickness caused by rapid ascents and descents in skyscraper elevators. If you stay in New York long enough, your middle ear is shredded. It's terrible, but true.

So what do you think was the point of Time's visit? A publicity stunt?

I wish it were so innocuous.

There's a name for the brand of journalism being practiced by Time and some newspapers these days, a kind of journalism that tries to convince readers that a magazine or newspaper is not simply an information provider, but a sanctified instrument of civic salvation.

This attitude is called public journalism. It was born after the agonizing labor pains of analyzing lost readership. This so-called disconnect from a stable core of news consumers just happens to parallel the shift among news journals from reporting the news to making readers happy.

Public journalism, in its effort to convince readers that newspapers and magazines can restore civic discourse and thereby engage readers in solutions and problem-solving, soon finds itself on a course of disseminating intolerant opinions disguised as news. Once upon a time, newspapers prided themselves on separating news from opinion. Not public journalism. Some critics would charge, based on that measuring stick, that the Southeast Missourian is the Satan of public journalism.

I would disagree. But I'm the editor. I don't have a good perspective, do I?

Besides, even if I think this newspaper succeeds at keeping opinion and news apart, it only matters what the readers think. Thank God for a free press, which means Southeast Missourian readers can decide for themselves.

What disturbs me so much is the guile of editors at Time and newspapers like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who not only don't think public journalism is bad journalism, but don't give a goat's patoot what readers think.

Golly, Joe, is public journalism the Antichrist, or what?

Let's not get carried away. Good people do well-intentioned stuff with ugly consequences all the time. That doesn't make them evil. Just misguided. Or hapless.

Don Corrigan of St. Louis has been a newspaper editor, journalism professor and a writer for investigative columnist Jack Anderson in Washington, D.C. He has written a scholarly book called "The Public Journalism Movement in America: Evangelists in the Newsroom." Corrigan makes no bones about his distaste for public journalism, but he examines it critically, which is to say he presents a well-rounded view, not a one-sided tirade.

The mistake of newspapers that adopt public journalism, according to Corrigan, is the faulty reasoning about why newspapers lose readers. It's not because newspapers and readers have disengaged over some neglect of civic responsibility. It's because too many newspapers don't cover the news. They're boring as heck. The real problems, he says, are lack of competition, the narrowing of political discussion, subservience to the political system of adversarial yapping, the dominance of public relations, the decline of investigative reporting, the demise of the written word, the failure of journalism schools and a crisis of self-confidence.

By gum, I couldn't have said it better.

And, dear reader, you probably think too much has been said already. If you've made it this far, congratulations. You have achieved the noble rank of Gold Star Reader. I wouldn't have dumped all of this on you if I didn't think it was important.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.