News-making and reporting are caught in a process of rationalisation which can be summarized in the injuction to produce fast, to write short and simple and to value useful news for audiences only interested by practical matters. This paper would firstly suggest that if this new style of journalism has produced interesting innovations, its costs are worthier debating than its contributions. It would then argue that mobilising the competitive advantages of a tradition of investigative and narrative journalism may be a reasonable bet to struggle against the news supplied by blogs, aggregators and short-format news sources. A third part suggests how this apparent "back to basics" involves however significant changes in both the training of journalists and the nature of the medium used for the diffusion of this renewed style of reporting.