“Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal,” Frank Baker, the [AP's] Los Angeles assistant bureau chief, wrote on Tuesday morning.

I was talking (arguing) with a friend of mine the other day about the goals of newspapers, and how they decide what is important. He was saying that important news stories were chosen by journalists without considering how interested the general public would be in the story. I said that considering what’s going to be popular, and what’s important to your readers, is a good gauge of what news stories in your area are important.

“Won’t this lead to newspapers being content-wise indistinguishable from supermarket tabloids?” he asked.

“Initially,” I said, “maybe. But I have confidence that popular opinion will swing back, and we’ll find a happy medium. People do care about what’s happening in their towns.”

This NYT article reminded me of that conversation.

In a memo Tuesday, Baker, the AP’s assistant bureau chief for Los Angeles, reminded his reporters that Britney Spears’ ongoing meltdown is news, and they should be covering the newsworthy aspects of it.

…“we want to pay attention to what others are reporting and seek to confirm those stories that WE feel warrant the wire,” [Baker]wrote, adding, “And when we determine that we’ll write something, we must expedite it.”

People want to know what’s happening to Britney, and as LA AP reporters, it their job to report it. And quickly.

I don’t think this is “Not a good day for journalism as a discipline.” as is quoted in the article, but I do think that this is where we need to go if we’re going to have a backlash against insubstantial reporting.

But guess what? The backlash may already be beginning. In a previous post on Gawker, I mentioned that journalists probably like taking the piss out of bloggers who snark about them all day, but after a bunch of Gawker editors quit, there seems to be some well-thought-out misgivings about the blog family’s new direction.

On top of that,a few bloggers from Gawker’s Gizmodo tech blog recently got banned from the largest tech show in the country, the International CES, after some crappy stunt.

It seems like the division between blogger and journalist is re-widening, and people are realizing that newspapers offer something that a lot of these popular blogs to not. At the same time, newspapers are looking at theses blogs as test cases, to see what people are really looking for, and what’s important to people today.