Ah, what was old is new again.

That was my first reaction after reading a blog post by journalism provocateur and professor Jeff Jarvis suggesting it was time (again) to rethink the basic form of the story in the digital age.

Jarvis was prompted to write "The article as a luxury or byproduct" after Brian Stetler of the New York Times explained how he used Twitter to post his early reporting after a deadly tornado leveled much of Joplin, Mo. Stetler ruminated: "Looking back, I think my best reporting was on Twitter."

Blogger Matt Ingram fired back: "No, Twitter Is Not a Replacement for Journalism." Ingram, who worked for the Toronto Globe and Mail, now writes for GigaOm.

Thus ensued a back-and-forth across the Internet. But it is an important conversation, because the digital age is changing our notion of story. For instance, who would have predicted a decade ago that many publications would break news online first, and that some would even do it on sites other than theirs, like Twitter? So this month I'd like to share my two cents in the debate from my blog (edited a bit for space) and would love to get your reaction:

For those of us old enough to remember rewrite desks, and especially those of us who worked in the wire service, the reaction is sort of, "Uh, yeah?"

I think Jarvis is saying that, especially for breaking news, the default no longer has to be the standard inverted pyramid, nice 500-word package story.

The standard operating procedure for a wire service reporter wasn't to wait around to assemble a breaking story but to pick up the phone and dictate the first couple of paragraphs. That went out on the wire. Then you dictated another few sentences. Someone on the desk fixed your breathless prose and sent it out, then went back, assembled the pieces, maybe threw in some background.

Then you did it all over again, sometimes moving information out in pieces, sometimes topping the existing story, sometimes writing it through.

As the joke goes, my name is on some of the best copy I've never written.

Now, we tweet. We post on Facebook and Flickr. The chunks are smaller, but still chunks. The assembly is done with things like Storify that can pull together varied media threads into a sort of coherent narrative.

And for the initial wave, that may well be all we need. In fact, too much of what we call "story" isn't story at all. It's factual exposition that tries to impose structure on often unstructured events. Perhaps it is better told in chunks.

But Ingram is right, too. Ultimately, we are wired for "stories." After we've confirmed bin Laden is dead, and the initial Twitter rush has slacked and the hormones dial back, we start looking for meaning, and meaning in our psychology often means some kind of story – and that means journalism.

Even Stetler updated his post:

"I’ve thought about this comment a little bit more. I believe it’s true that 'my best reporting was on Twitter,' but only up until a certain point on Monday, probably around 11 p.m. local time. After that point, with a more stable Internet connection, I was able to file complete stories for NYTimes.com, not just chunks of copy."

I'm hoping someday to wake up on July Fourth and (barring the world blowing up) see at the top of my local news organization's website a big interactive map that lets me click on the various marked parades, fairs, celebrations and find out details on each one. Because, after all, isn't that the story for most of your readers for the first 10 hours or so of that day?

Then later in the day, as the narrative starts to unfold, I want that journalism – the poignant or funny photo, maybe the video, the telling moment fashioned by a good journalist telling a good story.

We need to think about new story forms as Jarvis suggests. We need to always remember the journalism as Ingram notes. What we can't do is stay stuck in the past, even if it is a lot like the future. So what's the problem?

Now, Shirley, get me rewrite.

Doug Fisher, a former AP news editor, teaches journalism at the University of South Carolina and can be reached at dfisher@sc.edu or 803-777-3315.