How's Journalism Doing?

Lots of us in the business are asking that question ... for selfish AND altruistic reasons.

Last week, Newsweek announced it was buying out over a hundred key employees.

I started my career as a Newsweek summer intern in 1989, and went on to work there full time for four years. I learned so so much there, although the racial environment was ... complicated. (It always is.)

So many of the people who took the buyout taught me how to be a journalist: how to get your calls out early; how to deal with hostile sources; even to be brave and sure of myself when traveling alone. I got to do so many amazing things, including going as a press pool reporter on Air Force One.

Now, a recent article in the New York Times (which we discussed on air) noted how few outlets are even sending press reporters on the presidential campaign trail. It costs too much. It costs too much to have feet-on-the-street journalism, I suppose.

I could give you a whole dissertation on media economics, but this is the short form: everything has gone digital; the big companies don't know how to shift their revenue models; some media companies (or their parent companies) are expecting a 25 percent return instead of the single digit returns they used to expect; so they are faced with adding digital infrastructure AND declining revenues from traditional models AND desperation AND ... that means people are getting fired. En masse.

While we are having the most important political election of our times; the housing market is collapsing; and the war rages. While we have SO MUCH NEED for good journalism, some of the people who actually have the best skills are leaving or being forced out of the business.

That's the bad part.

The good part is that there are also bright spots of innovation and success, including blogs that do original reporting; the smarter news-entertainment hybrid shows (Iike The Daily Show and Real Time with Bill Maher); student journalism; and the many traditional news organizations and reporters that are still trying to build a community of informed listeners/readers/viewers ... and (via blogs and other media) user-participants.

Also, the announcement this week of the Pulitzer Prizes spurred this article by Washington Post bloggerJoel Achenbach, which read in part.

The [Washington] Post has just won six Pulitzer Prizes, which looks like a typo. It was a newsroom-wide triumph -- Metro, National, Investigative, Foreign, Financial, Magazine. Within that Variety Pack of journalism, there's a common ingredient -- something we too seldom discuss when we cogitate about how to reinvent the business model: Reporting.

Original reporting still matters. It's probably our best gimmick. It's what we do (imperfectly to be sure) better than anyone else in the news business. It also can't be easily replaced on the cheap by some other information-delivery system.

Our role at News & Notes is a hybrid. Although we do some original reporting, we also rely on a lot of guests who spend weeks, months, even years generating investigative reports and books.

I love hitting the road -- as we will when we go to Atlanta next week. But I also love the idea that we can do something to highlight the great work that's being done by so many reporters at such a critical time.

Farai Chideya

5:03 PM ET | 04- 8-2008 | permalink

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