Posts tagged newsrooms

It’s a fairly basic constitutional issue for the press, whether or not there is a reporter’s privilege. It’s something a lot of people outside the press don’t really understand, don’t really care about. I think the basic issue is whether you can have a democracy without aggressive investigative reporting and I don’t believe you can. So that’s why I’m fighting it.

The past two decades have witnessed a disconcerting decline in the quality of coverage, particularly by TV networks obsessed with presentation rather than content. This became more pronounced during the US-led invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The ‘dictatorship’ of live-time coverage has proved especially subversive. ‘Parachuted’ journalists are obliged to broadcast within minutes, even if they have no idea what’s going on.

This means less legwork. As veteran producers lament, their networks have abandoned real journalism, while Fox News is nothing more than propaganda. Wars are now presented as reality shows with computer game graphics and screaming captions.

If things that are not journalism entertain, inform and facilitate agency better than things that are, don’t bet on journalism to thrive.

I work for a newspaper and I think about how to reinvent newspapers and reassert their relevance all the time. And people are consuming more news than ever, so we must be doing something right. My guess, though? Most innovation in media and most of the revenue and most of the value will come not from the incumbents and not even from news startups, but from people who unwittingly stumble into producing media as the solution to another problem.

Journalists like to think of themselves as responding to a calling, or duty. For some journalists, there are stories that are worth taking a calculated risk to obtain—pieces that establish responsibility for organized rapes or massacres, for example, or reports that implicate powerful figures in corruption or organized crime. These are stories that would otherwise not be told.

Every high-risk decision brings both the potential of lasting, positive impact, and the possibility of permanent, tragic loss. Decisions about risk are highly personal, but the individual should be keenly self-aware. Your emotions come into play, as does adrenaline. A good story with an element of danger can bring with it a rush as compelling as sex or drugs.

In such a moment, you might be wise to ask yourself: Am I being driven by the emotions of the moment? How much of my decision is driven by ego? How much am I motivated by telling the story—and how much by the glory I might derive from telling it? Am I trying to prove something to myself or others? Perhaps every journalist is motivated by some incalculable mix of service and ego, intellect and emotion. Experience can help you better discern between duty, ego, and adrenaline.

My advice: Give yourself a chance to understand not only your coverage area, but yourself. There are plenty of tough stories to go around. If you really want to take on a dangerous beat, you’ll get your chance. So, yes, J-school students, your professors are right: Go ahead, go overseas. But start with a beat that allows you to learn—mainly about yourself.

When President Obama addressed the American Society of News Editors convention last month, the real news was what didn’t happen. The watchdogs didn’t bark. No discouraging word from the gathering of 1,000 of the country’s top news people, facing a president whose administration has led a vigorous attack on journalism’s most indispensable asset — its sources.

Obama took office pledging tolerance and even support for whistleblowers, but instead is prosecuting them with a zeal that’s historically unprecedented. His Justice Department has conducted six prosecutions over leaks of classified information to reporters. Five involve the Espionage Act, a powerful law that had previously been used only four times since it was enacted in 1917 to prosecute spies…

…As Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ government secrecy project, put it: “The administration’s aggressive pursuit of leaks represents a challenge to the practice of national security reporting, which depends on the availability of unauthorized sources if it is to produce something more than ‘authorized’ news.”

What’s behind the administration’s fervor isn’t clear, but the news media have largely rolled over and yawned. A big reason is that prosecutors aren’t hassling reporters as they once did. Thanks to the post-9/11 explosion in government intercepts, electronic surveillance, and data capture of all imaginable kinds — the NSA is estimated to have intercepted 15-20 trillion communications in the past decade — the secrecy police have vast new ways to identify leakers.

So they no longer have to force journalists to expose confidential sources. As a national security representative told Lucy Dalglish, director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, “We’re not going to subpoena reporters in the future. We don’t need to. We know who you’re talking to.