Rescuing The Reporters
Last week I gave a talk on newspapers at the Shorenstein center. (They did an amazing job with the transcript, including annotating the talk with a remarkable amount of linking.) During the talk, I ran through various strategies for funding local reporting, including an idea I first saw articulated by Steve Coll that reporters should become employees of non-profit entities.
After the talk, I decided to do a “news biopsy,” as a way of thinking about Coll’s idea. I wanted to see how much newspaper content was what Alex Jones calls the iron core of news — reporters going after facts — and how much was “other stuff” — opinion columns, sports, astrology, weather, comics, everything that was neither a hard news story or an ad.
