Even though I think it’s great, the latest episode of This Week in Tech attacked the new revamp of the Wall Street Journal.
John Dvorak’s prescription for the industry: “A newspaper is supposed to be about news. It’s not supposed to be about features, these long-winded features about hemlines or something that’s got nothing to do with anything. … If you’re going to bore the public to death with the product and wonder why the circulation is down, look within.”
But apparently not to your hemline.
In related news, all of the Freedom Communication papers are going to be getting new Web sites in the next few months (so yes, this means a new, new Daily Press Web site). I’m not quite sure what the end result will be, but it sounds like the new Hesperia Star site will be of a destination site than it is currently, which is all to the good. First up will be a big Web-only feature about Hesperia hemlines.
Journalists’ killings, jailings at 10-year high:
The survey by Reporters Without Borders found that 81 journalists were killed last year and more than 140 are behind bars. Iraq was the most deadly, with 39 reporters and 26 other media workers killed. It was the worst year for deaths since 1994.
The group includes some bloggers in the category of journalists.
Democracy looks like a school board meeting ending at 11:07 p.m.
By the end, everyone was exhausted and I think a few tempers were getting frayed, but truthfully, it’s a good thing to see folks turning out in large numbers in response to what their local government is doing.
And I’m not just saying that because I’m an hourly employee, either.
One of the side effects of the war in Iraq not going as well as it might is that the military is less and less interested in sharing details about it. But as I said months ago, when I was hoping to get to go over there, just as I did Bosnia a decade ago, it’s the most important story of the present time, and the consequences of the war run deep through American society, especially here in Hesperia.
The official reluctance to talk to the press also seem to have trickled down to the rank and file. Two years ago, it was much easier to reach Hesperians who are or were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan (the modern ability to communicate to soldiers in a war zone by e-mail is pretty amazing, frankly, especially when coupled with the ubiquity of digital cameras). Today, there just isn’t that much interest among service personnel in talking about the war.
I’m a military brat, and was raised by a father who served in Vietnam and spent my early childhood on Army bases. I’m not interested in doing hit pieces on the Iraq war, just as I wasn’t interested in doing them on the Bosnia peace-keeping mission (see the navigation bar to the left to read all those stories), but naturally, no one really knows that before they talk to me and see what the final story looks like.
But still, it’s disappointing. When I do get a chance to write these sorts of stories, the response is phenomenal, such as the huge outpouring of support for the Delgadillo girls, after my story in December about the five of them living alone, raised by the 21-year-old sister while both parents are serving in Iraq.
I bring this up because I’ve got another Iraq story in Tuesday’s paper, and while Chris Horsley would still enlist in the Army, knowing what he knows now, the tone is strikingly different than the comparable stories I wrote in 2004. Chris’ mother, Marilyn, was formerly the office manager here at the Hesperia Star, and I’m afraid she’s not going to love the story, which pulls no punches about her son’s mission and the extreme danger he’s in. But not telling that half of the story would feel like a betrayal of what Chris, and those like him, are going through.
The Miami Herald has posted an interesting column, saying that the standard method of newsroom organization is bad for journalism:
A colleague on the police beat had learned of minor wrongdoing involving town cops. But publishing a story on it would come at the cost of the reporter’s continued access to valuable sources within the police department. Worse, she said, her state’s law allows police to withhold practically all information about investigations that haven’t brought arrests.
”This means that reporters have to keep up a good relationship with officers in order to get anything on unsolved crimes, no matter how small or how serious,” she said in her posting to the online ethics site I participate in. So the reporter faced a choice: She could sit on a perfectly newsworthy story that would embarrass the sources she relies on, or she could write it and sacrifice her future effectiveness as a police reporter.
It’s a conundrum, but it’s more than an occasional problem for a small-town paper. In fact, this conflict has been institutionalized into a routine reality that traditional journalists face, thanks to the near-universal adoption of a particular way of organizing newsrooms. Here I’m talking about beats.
Under the beat system, reporters are assigned specific subject areas and, more to the point, responsibility to cover the public or private institutions that dominate them. The upside of the beat system is clear. It encourages journalists to develop pockets of expertise so they can report knowledgeably on topics that require focus and specialization to understand.
But the beat system also requires reporters to get to know the people who control the information their coverage depends on, so they can call on those sources and rely on them. And here’s where the problems begin. The reporter’s success in covering a beat depends on the cooperation of the people being covered — and not just their cooperation, but their good will. If you deliberately set out to invent an arrangement less conducive to tough, adversarial reporting, it would be hard to beat beats.
Seen from that perspective, we shouldn’t be surprised that journalism is so often timid and reverential toward sources; the miracle is that journalists are ever tough and courageous, that beat reporters do defy their sources. But that’s a mark of their own guts and ethical maturity, and of the presence of determined informants within the institutions they cover. It’s not testimony to the wisdom of the system within which reporters operate.
Would journalism suffer if beats were abandoned? Running a staff would be harder, but life could get interesting. Time and again great stories have been broken by outsiders with clear eyes, who owe nothing to those who feed and water the beat reporters. Watergate didn’t come out of The Washington Post’s political staff, the My Lai massacre wasn’t uncovered by a Pentagon correspondent, and the White House press corps was complicit in the disinformation campaign leading up to the Iraq invasion.
Beats have got to go. They’re an endemic conflict of interest. Fortunately, they are going, and while Internet scribes have areas of interest and expertise, they have so far resisted institutionalizing themselves in the sclerotic fashion of traditional news media. Reporters can be smart and informed, and still be free.
I think the notion that Internet writers don’t carve out tiny little niches that are essentially beats is wrong; I think most of the writers who take it as seriously as offline journalists do are doing exactly that.
I didn’t study journalism in school beyond one class required for all Communications Studies majors at Virginia Tech (and, of course, my broadcasting classes there), so the origins of beat reporting are a new one on me.
I’m not sure how practical getting rid of beat reporting would be, and I suspect the short-term losses of having reporters who know, say, local government well enough to cover it with any sort of insight might outweigh the long-term gains of not having reporters beholden to their subjects. But columnist Edward Wasserman is right that it’s an awkward dance at times.
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