Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

The story about the search for the Malaysian Airlines jet has brought the best and worst out in the media.

On the one hand, we have seen reporters only interested in capturing raw emotions thrusting cameras and tape recorders in the tear-soaked faces of grieving relatives.

They have also started to dissect the lives of the crew and some of the passengers on board knowing that many of those painful revelations will turn out to be about innocent people.

But they have also asked the hard questions of investigators, such as why the probe has been so slow and so chaotic. And they have kept literally billions of people around the world informed about the missing airliner. One of those reports may eventually prove crucial in explaining the tragic mystery.

The mainstream media and the credible Internet media are doing a lot more than the rumormongers you can find in many places online.

The disappearance is so incredible that even the conspiracy theorists can hardly outdo the mainstream theories about what has happened. Pilot suicide, terrorism, theft of the plane, hostages held for ransom, foreign government intervention, you name it, nothing is unreasonable. Only abduction by elves or aliens takes us out of the mainstream.

For those of us working in newspapers, magazines, and even radio and TV, it has been sad in recent years to see our boats sinking in the tsunami of the Internet.

Occasionally, we may even feel like an aged craftsman waiting for the last old customer who still bothers to have his favorite clockwork watch fixed so that we spend the last hours of our lives to present him with the best work we've ever done before dying with dignity.

Sales of newspapers in China dropped almost 9 percent in the first half of 2013. You can hardly find an 18-year-old American who reads a newspaper every day, even online. And they aren't that much more diligent about TV news; the viewership of local TV among adults under 30 in the US has dropped 14 percentage points since 2006. The image of the watch repairer beckons for journalists around the world.

Even a keen news reader like me won't flip over the New York Times for the latest progress in the search. When it arrives in the morning in print or online, there normally isn't anything I haven't already learned online before I went to bed the previous night.

But here is why that is a hopeful sign: You may have got concrete information about the search from Facebook and Twitter, but most of that news originated from established media, be it in their traditional venues or through websites. Without professionally produced "real" news, the incident would have been completely hijacked by the conspiracy theorists.

One survey commissioned by the New York Times in 2012 showed that only 15 percent of people between 18 to 65 who are defined as digital news consumers, meaning they get news online at least several times a week, get news from social media. The majority of them get it directly from web news sources, and tend to turn to established news outlets for big events.

Traditional news channels may be dying, but professional journalism is not. And it can live well in the digital era.

You may have stopped holding the ink-smeared newspaper in your hand every day, but you still need reliable news sources. There may be software able to write news like a trained reporter, but there is no other way to collect the raw, accurate and impartial information except through the relentless inquiring, digging, and checking and balancing of journalist foot soldiers.

In the US, thriving online news media, such as the Huffington Post, ProPublica and First Look Media, and the enlarging readerships of the websites of established media outlets have shown that little can replace hard-edged journalism.

What worries me is the situation in China. For a brief moment in recent years, the media industry in China seemed to be more robust than that in the US. New newspapers and magazines shot up like bamboo shoots after rain in the spring, and Chinese journalists became more confident in their profession.

But that didn't last long. Mid-career journalists, including several friends of mine, have started to declare the imminent death of print and other traditional media and have been escaping to the virtual world.

If that influx of professionals to the Internet could generate high quality online news, there could be a bright future. But too many online news websites in China seem to be a mere combination of Reader's Digest and Taobao, with no space for costly, original news at all.

One may blame censorship for thwarting the dream of serious journalists. But if you give up journalism before you even have the chance to do serious journalism, you have no one else to blame than yourself, especially when the betrayal is in the name of embracing the future.

The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com