The WSJ's Paul Steiger reflects on the News Biz and where it's headed
Submitted by: cho on Sat, 12/29/2007 - 14:02
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Paul Steiger, a 41 year newspaper veteran, packs his boxes at The Wall Street Journal and reflects on what is happening to the "news" Read All About It.
Many of us knocking around the ePluribus Media community for the past three years have been reflecting (in countless essays and articles) on how online organizations, like our own, impact news, news gathering, research, investigation and the big media organizations themselves. Just a couple of days ago, I posted some preliminary thoughts about The New London Day -- the "non-profit," independent newspaper I have been reading about recently.
It was startling then, to open today's weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal and see what Steiger suggests below the fold.
For readers, the implications are clear: a stark contrast of feast and famine.
The cornucopia of national, international and business news, sports, and especially opinion available free on the Web is rich beyond historical parallel. Anyone with a fact, a comment, a snapshot or a video clip can self-publish and instantly compete with the professionals.
At the same time, the vast array of investigative reporting and foreign correspondence assembled at American newspapers over the past several decades is being cut back at all but a few publications, as papers succumb to the pressure to cut costs.
Many journalists and academics see in these cutbacks a threat to the democratic ideal of a well-informed public. Some urge turning to philanthropy or an expansion of public television as a way to fill the gap.
Most of the factual territory Steiger covers is old hat to folks here who have been reading Aaron Barlow in his many essays about journalism or his book The Rise of the Blogosphere which really covers the role of newspapers in the public sphere from the earliest days of our country until now, with the rise on online news. But Steiger's intimate, 4 decades long involvement with news and his anecdotes (including the news photographer who in the fifties carried a dead bird in his trunk because there was never time to wait for a live one to flutter into the frame of a shot he wanted to get) is a compelling read.
Many of us have been looking at the different models of news: D.E. Funing uncovered an interesting Harvard working paper by Charles Lewis about how the future of news (not advertising nor propaganda) lay in the non-profit sector, especially in such entities as the Center for Public Integrity that he started. I have written about publishers like Brandt Ayers who have turned their papers into non-profit ventures to be able to more "honestly" report, eschewing the faux objectivity of giving equal space and exposure to "he said/she said." I have reviewed the J-Lab report on citizen journalism and the move by the big papers to hyperlocal -- Hyper Local -- a recap of the J-Lab research as well as given a keynote speech and written about our own venture Bridging the Gap between Citizen Journalism and established Media.
Steiger makes several predictions based on what he admits is idle speculation, but several of them look to me like good bets, partially because some of Aaron's and my Columbia School of Journalism Sulzberger colleagues are engines behind the successes. For himself, though, Steiger sees the future in the non-profit path that Ayers, Lewis and others have set out upon.
Final word: Next week I move over to a nonprofit called Pro Publica as president and editor-in-chief. When fully staffed, we will be a team of 24 journalists dedicated to reporting on abuses of power by anyone with power: government, business, unions, universities, school systems, doctors, hospitals, lawyers, courts, nonprofits, media. We'll publish through our Web site and also possibly through newspapers, magazines or TV programs, offering our material free if they provide wide distribution.
Pro Publica* is the brainchild of San Francisco entrepreneurs-turned-philanthropists Herbert and Marion Sandler, who along with some other donors are providing $10 million a year in funding.
* link added in response to Carol's request.
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10 million a year in funding!
Where is a how-to link that says how to find a wonderful philanthropist. I haven't had a chance to read your links yet, dinner is calling, but I shall. Hope you are feeling better.
Fascinating....and exciting
The experience that these journalists are bringing together is awe-inspiring.
Many years ago a British radical journalist, Claude Cockburn, once advised left-wingers that if they truly wanted to know what was going on in the world and what were the real influences on events they should read the Financial Times. This horrified them, as the Financial Times was regarded as an anathema to their ideology. Yet, he spoke the truth. Their journalists deal with the real issues of power and report these in the greatest and most informed depth. (Interestingly, it has just been voted the UK Newspaper of the Year, yet again, this year.)
The same can be said of the training, experience and knowledge of the Wall Street journalists that will lead this new venture. It will be fascinating to see how their work develops, unleashed from the demands of owners with vested interests and governments and advertisers with strong influence on editorial content.
They will, however, have to learn a new set of disciplines in order to produce a "tight" product. For all the negative effects that the requirement to make a profit has, it does act as a powerful driving force to ensure that what is produced is focused and steadfast in its professionalism. Remove the profit motive from the equation and you can have an organisation that flounders without a coherent vision and that fails to produce excellence - even if that excellence in serving a market is in areas that not all of us would choose.
I'm not sure if this new media has a meaningful comparison for ePluribus Media. Yes, hopefully they will cover areas that we now find are neglected by the mainstream media and, through their investigative work, draw attention to the "news-worthiness" of stories that are overlooked or have a distressingly short span of attention. They will have more highly trained writers and much greater direct access to sources. They are professionals - we have an equally proud label of being amateur citizen journalists.
In theory, we should have hundreds of contributors (why, oh why are we not doing more to involve others?) compared to their twenty-four. Our roles could be symbiotic - we find and flesh out and give light to the obscure and they take it forward and refine it into material that gets the attention of even cable news (very much in the way that the McClatchy Washington Bureau took forward the blogosphere's concerns about the US Attorneys affair). The new venture could/will be yet another powerful link between citizen journalism and that confoundedly difficult to arouse"white girl goes missing", "star's teenage sister has baby" obsessed mass news organisations. (Sorry Huffingtom Post, but even you have succumbed to it - it is unlikely that Pro Publica will follow suit!)
(Chow - the link to your earier commentary explains your absence. I'm sorry that you have had such a nasty virus - glad that you feel better now)
Couldn't agree with you more, Welshman
I suspect that one can stay focused without the profit motive, but it is danged much more difficult to handle.
It seems too, that the "pressure" (if I may be so bold to call it that) that citizen journalists and activists are exerting has indeed been felt by the media organizations -- as more than a tiny annoyance or gnat. The better media outfits are stepping up and doing better work, the typical response of news organizations to competition. I am arguing from just one example here -- but the pressure from the citizen journalists such as Ilona Meagher and D.E. Ford on the topic of PTSD and the shameful treatment of our veterans as well as the work by the activists such as Jim Staro surely has had something to do with CBS waking up and doing the FOIAs on veteran suicides.
I have offline conversations with folks who think non-profit is the salvation of investigative news; others who believe the non-profit route is naive and a dead end. That's why I have been reading up on the newspapers and media organizations that are "non-profit," but even those are "funded" by someone -- who may or may not have an agenda.
Interesting late night thoughts, Welshman. I haven't read yet the Associated Press book, Breaking the News -- just Aaron's review of it, I look forward to your other ideas about what, to me, is a fascinating watershed moment in the history of "information."
Business section
I read the business papers everyday. I'm curious to see how the WSJ fairs under Rupert Murdoch. I'm noticing more and more refs to Bloomberg News.
Avahome sent this link
to the NYTimes story this morning (12-30-07) about the Government and the Military paper the Stars and Stripes "commingling" funds to produce propaganda.