Paul Krugman, upon reading the Washington Post Ombudsman’s review of that paper’s coverage of the US health-care debate, offers a few reasons why poor coverage of major policy issues happens – which actually go a long way to account for the poor state of most journalism.
Paul Krugman is invited to be part of some TV news panel which is then cancelled because the news org can’t find someone to represent “the other side”.
Neiman Journalism Lab interviews the developer who built the user-driven expenses tracker for the newspaper’s website.
The charging-for-content thing has been gaining traction (or, at the very least, a few media companies have been signalling their intention to do it, even if the usual gang of new media pundits still think it’s a dumb idea) for several weeks, and in that time I’ve started to think: You know, I probably would pay to read the NYT online. Their reporting is better, their blogs are more interesting, and the breadth of information they offer is wider than anything else out there. So, sure, that’s probably worth a few bucks.
Newspaper companies are going to start going bankrupt sooner than anyone thought. For example: the Tribune Co. has hired bankruptcy advisers. Although their predicament is somewhat unique, the fundamental issue is that their assets aren’t worth anything anymore.
Now that that Obama guy is going to be US president, Maureen Dowd has to write about other stuff. Her usual disdain is focused this time on the outsourcing of journalism jobs to India. The arguments against having the Pasadena, CA, news reported from India aren’t exactly elusive, and the comments on the piece demonstrate a general consensus on this being bad.
This isn’t an I-told-you-so, exactly, but I will observe that the precedent was set on this long ago. Newspapers operate in a capitalist system, and in the strictly economic sense that capitalists love to invoke, the importance of journalism to democracy or community or whatever else is irrelevant.
My old employers, demonstrating their continued ineptitude and lack of understanding of the media business, have been forced to cut 560 jobs in Canada. This isn’t the first round of cutbacks, and it mirrors the 5 percent staff cut at Fairfax, the Australian media giant that is similarly out of touch with the times.
Cuts are inevitable, of course, but the lack of progress in adapting to new possibilities in journalism and new media suggests the smartest cuts would be at the executive level, where bungling, ineffectual strategies and general cluelessness are the norm. Have you looked at a Canwest website lately?
Interesting that this coincides with the debate between Rosenbaum and Jarvis over journalism’s fate. A zillion people have weighed in on this already, and it’s actually really boring, so my take, briefly, is that Jarvis is half-right: while the decline of journalism isn’t the fault of journalists, they must nonetheless take responsibility for where it is going. Canwest’s executives obviously aren’t up for that job.
