Restructuring journalism

The steady decline of traditional news outlets has led the Columbia Journalism School to produce an extensive study on the “The Reconstruction of American Journalism.” While it focuses specifically on the American situation and on community “accountability reporting,” it gives clues to the likely evolution of global journalism in the future and makes interesting reading for anyone wondering how future abuses of power will be exposed, as traditional newspapers and television channels lose ground and revenues.

Surprisingly, the report is not quite as gloomy as one might expect. Major metropolitan news organizations in the US have shed staff members in large numbers: The Baltimore Sun’s newsroom shrank from 400 to 150 while at the Los Angeles Times, journalists decreased from 1,100 to 600. Overall, the study suggests, newsrooms had expanded from 40,000 in 1971 to 60,000 in 1992, before returning to their early-’70s numbers this year. But other news sources have picked up some of the slack.

For most of us abroad, Watergate is still the iconic event that defined investigative journalism worldwide. The report points out that it was only in the 1960s that journalists became more skeptical of the information fed to them by government. “Accountability reporting” may have shone during the Nixon presidency, but it was less successful during the tenure of George W. Bush, failing to stop the slow march, based largely on lies, toward the Iraq war. On the business side, too few news organizations warned of the impeding crisis, perhaps because of the cozy relationship that had developed between journalists and their Wall Street sources.

To survive these days, traditional newspapers have had to become creative. Some have turned to teamwork and the pooling of resources. In Ohio, the report points out, eight rival newspapers have formed a joint news organization to cover specific stories.

Collaborative reporting is also the philosophy behind Internet news organizations, often founded by laid-off newspaper reporters, which have sprouted in cyberspace. “Pro-am” journalism relies on professional journalists processing information gathered partly by amateur volunteers. Such cooperation between paid and unpaid news gatherers has made investigative reporting organizations such as ProPublica, which focuses on government and benefited from a $30 million grant to get started, and Politico, a Washington, D.C., insider news organization, successful. In France, Rue 89 functions in a similar way. Aggregator sites rely on big name writers, often unpaid, and content borrowed from other publications. When they get large enough, like The Huffington Post, they can start their own fund for investigative journalism.

Nongovernmental organizations which have expertise areas such as human rights or health and university faculty members as well as journalism students are all being roped in to form the infrastructure of a new form of journalism, still finding its way forward and trying to develop a new business model. Paid-for content offers one solution. Some news organizations now rely on a mix of advertising revenues, direct sponsorship by readers and philanthropic donations.

It will, of course, be interesting to see how journalism develops in countries that do not have a strong tradition of volunteerism or even a sense of responsible citizenship. While the report suggests that in the US at least, investigative journalism will survive in a different form, it is quite clear that the new framework currently being developed offers fewer jobs for experienced reporters. Yet my teacher friends tell me that journalism schools are still registering hopefuls in large numbers, who face bleak job prospects when they graduate.