In Fresh Air Discovered, Clyde Haberman makes a case for the eternal glory of the paper on the weighty evidence of collegiate majors picked by 57 freshmen, and clichés favored by Hollywood screenwriters.

Journalism is dying, is it not? … So why are the 57 journalism students at City University, bright and mostly young, fired up about a trade supposedly headed the way of buggy-whip manufacturing?

“They’re doing what they want to do,” Dean Shepard said of his students. As for job prospects, “they think the situation will work itself out.”

I have an idea how it will “work itself out” for most of those 57 CUNY j-schoolers. Look out for existentialwaiter.blogspot.com, et al.

Print journalism — better known to you quaint types as newspapers and magazines — remains their top choice, the dean said.

You might assume that’s a useful indicator. You might also assume that graduates of Harvard Business School flocking to a field is a sign of good things to come. But then you would be exactly wrong. Turns out HBS grads are a bunch of pack-following doofuses who come in just before things go to hell.

But if a college freshman has visions of working for that grimy newspaper office featured at the end of Devil, I suppose it’s another thing entirely. Heh, what if Haberman actually used movie representations of newspapers to support his thesis? Oh right, he did:

Humphrey Bogart plays the tough editor of a newspaper that is going under (sound familiar?) but not without a fight. He crusades against a mobster who had a woman killed. Her immigrant mother gives the editor evidence of the mobster’s guilt…

Perhaps someday a screenwriter — he may even be a former journalism student — will have a character say the same thing about Web logs.

We can only hope.

Of course there was that blogging character in Invasion who was helping to expose a government (alien!) cover-up, in tandem with his sister who reported for the local TV news. No “newspaper and magazine” reporters were written into the plot.

Invasion wasn’t on the silver screen, so Haberman probably hasn’t seen it. He’ll just have to wait a half year untill the muckraking blogger becomes a stock character so pervasive and annoying we’ll all be denying we have Internet connections.

There’s also non-fiction to consider, if one is able. The PriceRitePhoto episode, where a weblog brought down a mafia-esque camera shop in Brooklyn, impressed me. And Edward Hasbrouck’s story of TSA idiocy has left a dagger or two in the agency. There are probably even immigrant mothers with weblogs, if you care to look for them.

It’s too late to get Bogart, but perhaps if Cruise started a “Web log” Haberman could take the format a little more seriously?