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April 18, 2006
Free? Think again
Because my wife is a teacher, my radio alarm goes off before 6 on weekday mornings. One recent morning, the first New Hampshire Public Radio news story I heard was about Jim McGonigle, the Allenstown police chief and Concord city councilor. In a few sentences the news reader explained that McGonigle was under investigation and on leave from the Allenstown job and had decided to resign from the city council.
This was not news to me. I knew from the Concord Monitor’s news meeting the day before that this story would be above the fold on page one of that morning’s Monitor. The story had been reported and written by our city reporter, Sarah Liebowitz.
The radio station had done no reporting. It had merely picked up the news from our website, our front page or the Associated Press and read the report as though it was the product of the station’s own work.
I’m accustomed to this. It is part of my morning ritual to curse rip-and-read local news reports that do not credit the source of the reporting.
I’ll spare you my diatribe on this subject and get to the point: To quote Jim Amoss, editor in chief of the Times-Picayune of New Orleans, getting the news to the public is “a mission that is sacred to us.” The event that occasioned this statement was the two Pulitzer Prizes the Times-Picayune had just won for its Katrina coverage, but the mission Amoss described is in the soul of every newspaper journalist every day.
The big news in our industry is that the economic model that enables newspaper journalists to carry out their mission is breaking down. Technological advances have created an atmosphere that says the news is instant and free (even though consumers pay for cable, cell-phone and internet access). Newspapers are struggling to get the most out of the old economic model while adapting to a new and ever-changing one. Their future depends on creating new revenue streams to support their core mission.
This year’s Pulitzer Prizes are a statement of how much that mission means to American society. I agree with Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times. In telling his newsroom what he thought the Pulitzer results meant, Keller said: “The country has never needed us more than it does today.”
You can check out the list for yourself (go to this site and click on "What's new"), but allow me to cite just a few examples.
It was newspapers that got to the bottom of widespread congressional corruption last year. The investigative prize went to the Washington Post for an “indefatigable probe of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff.” This coverage led to the downfall of Tom DeLay and showed how money trumps the public good. The San Diego Tribune and Copley News Service won the national reporting prize for work that led to the disgrace and resignation of U.S. Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, whose vote was, quite literally, for sale.
The Bush administration’s extremes in pursuing the war on terror were the subject of two other winners. Dana Priest of the Washington Post uncovered a program under which the United States secretly imprisoned terrorism suspects in Eastern Europe. James Risen and Eric Lictblau of the New York Times exposed the administration’s program of secret domestic wiretapping.
This work and that of other winners – Nicholas Kristof’s campaign to keep the Darfur atrocities in the public eye, the New York Times reports on the harsh, unstable Chinese legal system and David Finkel’s brave look at U.S. efforts to sow the seeds of democracy in Yemen – helped Americans understand their country and its role in the world. These journalistic efforts held elected officials to a high standard. They applied a reality test to the rhetoric in which politicians clothe their actions.
For the Pulitzer winners and all newspaper journalists, the traditional newspaper economic model has created the ability to do their work without commercial considerations. Yes, a reliable news report produced over time for an interested auduence will have economic benefits for the newspaper. Yes, newspaper editors have budgets. But no reporter goes to Darfur or Iraq or Yemen – or develops a story on Jim McGonigle’s problems in the Concord area – thinking about whether his or her work will make money for the paper. In fact, good news coverage costs money – a lot of money.
That’s why I get irked when a radio or TV station repeats a condensed version of one of our stories without saying where it came from. In a world in which all news seems instant and free, the casual listener doesn’t think twice about where the story actually came from. Almost always, it originated with a newspaper.
Posted by Mike Pride at April 18, 2006 10:17 AM
Comments
Hi Mike, I enjoyed reading your blog about the importance of newsprint on my "electronic" computer tonight. I suspect that there are many more facts that are irksome besides stories that originate in newspapers and are used by "other" media who neglect to give credit source where credit source is due. When growing up in the fifties, the consensus amongst the adults was that the media were responsible in their news stories in every arena. Kind of like "if I read it in the newspaper" the newspaper represented the truth.People of that era really believed that. They believed in the societal norms of truth, honesty, forthrightness, and doing the right thing. At least in my home town.
One thing this computer age has done is demand instant information. Instead of being a useful tool for society to make appropriate decisions based on fact, the media now packages their programs to sell. And they must sell these packages at the speed of light, Truth sometimes falls by the wayside. Lives are forever damaged by a few inaccurate clicks. Information rushes in from so many directions and with so many motivations and agendas... how can one know? Know the truth? Know exactly what happened?
Is the Concord Monitor slanted left or right in its mission to report the news? I don't know what you guys down at the office think; but the average Joe's I know say the Concord Monitor is a leftist newspaper. Very liberal in its perceptions of how folks should be. I guess in the Concord metroplex this fits in nicely. I lived in Concord many years. There are nice folks there. But in all fairness, there are a lot of different types of folks who live in Concord. Folks who are moderate and also folks who are conservative. What newspaper could you recommend that prints only the truth and is not biased one way or the other? Which one would print the whole story as opposed to "parts"?
The above is just a small irk. I have no idea if the Concord Monitor has a clear and concise mission and goals statement. I do read a lot. It is irksome to travel through so many biased articles, just to get an idea of what the truth might really be. It would be nice to read "here's what happened..." and then feel confident that I had read the exact truth. Let me make up my own mind how I want to feel about the information. Anyway, I enjoyed your blog!
Posted by: Dan Meeks at April 18, 2006 11:52 PM
I find it irksom that Dan Meeks would accuse the Monitor of being biased & leftist, of printing only parts of stories, of being guided by political agendas and ignoring the truth . . . all without a single example. He cites "so many biased articles" without bothering to direct our attention to one in particular so that we might judge for ourselves. It would be nice to read "here's what happened . . ." and then feel confident that I had read the exact truth. Unfortunately, it seems that I'm just supposed to take Mr. Meeks's word for it.
Posted by: Brendan Wolfe at April 20, 2006 02:09 PM