# Perhaps the biggest news was the announcement that the Huffington Post was teaming up with a number of philanthropies to form the Huffington Post Investigative Fund. The fund will basically support a team of investigative reporters, whose focus will be the economy. Whatever work they do will be available for publication anywhere. Here's a post from Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU who will be a senior adviser on the project, with some more details. Here's my favorite part:
But I also counseled Nick and Arianna (she will help raise money for the fund, and find partners for it) that the best approach is to have no orthodoxy and to support very traditional investigative reporting by paid pros who are good at it, as well as teams of pros and amateurs, students working with masters of the craft, crowdsourced investigations, and perhaps other methods. They were already there with an ecumenical approach, combining old and new.I won't say that this is THE model that's going to work; I think the point is that the Investigative Fund could be a success, as far as it goes. At its best, I think a non-profit project like this can be a credible and high-profile part of the eventual melange of sources from which we'll all eventually get our news. The idea of leveraging the talents of amateur experts and novice reporters and crowdsourcing certain reporting tasks (something Talking Points Memo does frequently) is very exciting. The more people have a vested interest in the news, the better, I say.
# Two posts on the same topic: the oft-forgotten idea that in many cases, what's bringing newspapers down is plain old poor management. Athenae over at First Draft spews some righteous venom at Conrad Black and David Radner, who escorted the Chicago Sun-Times right into bankruptcy. Daniel Gross in Newsweek has a bit more of a measured approach. Here's a good quote:
The actions of the top executives in other bankrupt newspaper companies were criminal only if you consider gross financial stupidity and recklessness to be jailing offenses. Who loads up newspapers—cyclical companies whose revenues are in secular decline thanks to the disappearance of classified advertisements and the rise of the Internet—with tons of debt at precisely the wrong time? Financial geniuses, that's who.Newspapers are businesses, obviously. But they're not, as Gross writes, "assets to be flipped, leveraged, and stripped." In any given city, the local newspaper is a public trust, and it fills a need beyond those of other businesses. To piggyback off Gross's example of mattress companies, if Sealy were to go bankrupt, that would be bad, but you could still buy a Serta. If the Baltimore Sun goes bankrupt, well, then Baltimore doesn't have a newspaper, and there are very dire consequences to that prospect.
# At Slate, Jack Shafer calls for a return to yellow journalism. Shafer goes a bit into the history of yellow journalism, and dispels some oft-bandied-about myths. Money-ish quote:
Far from being a flavor consumed by only the poor and immigrants, yellow newspapers enjoyed wide readership across class, sex, and age lines. Media historian John D. Stevens found that the yellow papers "published a fair amount of sober financial, political, and diplomatic information." They crusaded against the privileged and the powerful; they exposed corruption in government and corporations and "probably encouraged the rise of magazine muckraking in the early twentieth century." The yellow papers also paid reporters well, which is a big plus in their favor.Sober objectivity is important in journalism, and so is the adversarial relationship that journalists are supposed to have with those who pull the levers of power. The problem with many journalists today, especially the big media stars on TV and in the Washington press corps, is that they view that objectivity and adversarial role as states of being, and not goals that need to be constantly striven for. Read any post by Glenn Greenwald or on Media Matters for examples of our media stars acting more as stenographers than as the people who are paid to ask the tough questions and keep our leaders' feet to the fire. (The press corps' general acquiescence to the Bush administration's claims leading up to the Iraq War is the prime, although far from the only, example.) All of this is to say that it's not like we're living in a golden age of quality journalism. It would be arrogant to think that there's nothing we can learn from yellow journalists.
# This was a very interesting post from the Times' Idea of the Day blog. The gist: advertising just isn't enough. The post quotes Eric Clemons, a professor at Wharton, who believes that even if newspapers could develop a decent business model based on Internet advertising, the revenue wouldn't be sufficient. The general Internet-using public has more effective and more trustworthy ways of determining what products they want to purchase. Definitely click through to Clemons's TechCrunch post: it gets feisty!
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