The internet and blogs aren't a new dawn for journalism - they're a new dawn for laziness, claims Mark Hooper.

If you believe all the sky-is-falling talk in the broadsheets lately, home blogging is killing journalism. The reality, as usual, is a bit duller: lazy journalists are killing journalism. The internet is just making it easier for them.

The reason is that in modern media, as the Wu-Tang Clan might say, Clicks Rule Everything Around Me. Desperate for a way to make their ad-funded websites work, Old Media is now engaged in a Gadarene rush for page impressions - any page impressions. Having seen how good bloggers are at attracting traffic, the traditional press tries to beat the amateurs at their own game, but only succeeds in looking like the proverbial dad at a wedding disco.

Before we go any further, I'd better get my confession in. I write a daily arts blog for a broadsheet, and I still like to kid myself that I put in a bit of effort in unearthing a newsworthy story that other people haven't heard about. But if I wake up in a cold sweat having realised I haven't filed that morning's copy, I may - on the odd occasion - have compiled a shoddy top ten list of rubbish lyrics/album covers/TV shows and invited the readers to suggest their own. I'm usually rewarded with a massive increase in page views and comments, whereas when I once put my investigative hat on and tracked down an internet millionaire who now pisses his money up the wall as a human beatboxer, I got precisely zero comments on my blog. When I wrote a predictable list of the ten laziest lyrics in pop (ironic that), I got 374 replies. Guess which approach the site prefers.

This obsession with generating comments comes hand in glove with lazy writing. It's easy to forego the reasoned, well-researched editorial and instead offer up sweeping generalisations just to provoke debate. And when you have direct, instant reader feedback, it's simple to alter your editorial stance to reflect or respond to the views of your readers. Either way, it's nothing like journalism as Lord Reith envisaged it, where the stress was on giving the public what they needed, not what they wanted.

So far, so cynical, but it's not just a case of idle journos trying to second-guess which stick to prod the public with. People are paid a lot of money to guarantee "search engine optimisation" (SEO) for articles - the right combination of words that will make your page pop up on Google before someone else's. At best, this is nothing worse than traditional "top down" newspaper editing, where the key points appear in the headline and intro because readers rarely get to the end and don't really care about clever puns in the headline. But it doesn't take a genius to realise that some words and phrases are searched for more often on Google than others. You can probably imagine the sort of thing. And it's safe to say "former internet millionaire beatboxer" isn't in the top ten. Or, for that matter, "Maurice Saatchi's views on civil liberties".

When the Telegraph recently ran a piece on precisely that subject, one of the first comments mentioned his sister-in-law Nigella Lawson and (a propos of nothing), the TV presenter Holly Willoughby. Of course, I can't say for sure whether the comment was real or supplied by a member of the Telegraph team (the site's editor hotly denied it). But either way, it will have conveniently increased the hits generated via Google. Because even if the "reader" who searches for "Nigella Lawson and Holly Willoughby" ends up at an article about civil liberties by mistake, that's one extra page impression for the advertising team. It's not journalism but a hit's a hit, wherever it came from.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for democratising opinion as the internet does. But the desire to spark debate often produces a (very) vicious cycle of ever-more rabid comments, and soon User Generated Comment doesn't seem quite such a good idea. There's a website called Speak You're Branes that collates the best examples of shrill idiocy from the world's blogs, representing a frightening insight into the opinions so lovingly cultivated by mainstream blog editors. Best (or worst) of the bunch is a blogger so perfectly insane that if he didn't exist, someone would make him up. He goes by the name of "Politically Incorrect". And guess what? He more than lives up to it. Here, for instance, are his (unedited) predictions for the next season of Doctor Who: "The doctor dies and returns as a black, gay, transexual, vertically challanged, doctor who has recently converted to Islam. Well I'm sure that's how the PC BBC would really like it."

But he's a dedicated blogger on the BBC's site, so his page impressions are invaluable. Lord Reith would be proud.