I HEARD A guy named Duncan Black speak last week in Washington, D.C., at an Association of Alternative Newsweeklies conference. Black, who also goes by the name of Atrios, (atrios.blogspot.com) is pretty famous in the blogosphere: his site gets about 100,000 unique visitors a day.

Black talked a lot about bloggers as media watchdogs – often very conservative media watchdogs but still people who try to hold the big, mainstream outlets more accountable. I love that; left or right, it's a good thing.

Then someone in the audience asked a telling question. How do you know, she wondered, whether the material you rely on for your links and your commentary is accurate? How does any blogger know he or she isn't just spreading around and perpetuating the same media lies and mistakes?

Well, Black said, he tries to be sure his sources are reliable, and he'll often do a Google search to make sure that source materials are what they're supposed to be. "But I don't pick up the phone and call the police to see if someone is really charged with a crime," he said.

Which is why, for all the fascination with blogs, there will always be a need for newspapers. Maybe they won't be on newsprint, and maybe they'll have a different name, but if the world is going to function properly, and maybe even get a little better, reporters are always going to have to find a way to talk to other real, live human beings to get firsthand information that can't be found on a computer.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to Hunter S. Thompson.

You've all read the obits. The stories are all (mostly) true. He was a nut, a freak, a drunken, stoned, drug-addled goofball who, when I met him a few years back, still loved life, every anguished, bloody day. I dunno what happened.

But I do know this: Beyond the madness, Hunter Thompson was, in his day, one of the best political reporters alive. He went out and looked fearlessly for the truth, wherever it was hiding. He felt the need, as he once wrote, "to cover the story, for good or ill."

The world is a smaller, cheaper place without you, Hunter. And to quote my favorite new dead writer, I'm sure all the lights went dim in Fat City the night they heard you finally cashed your check.

Tim Redmond