Who can afford investigative reporters? Along with the other costly paragons of journalistic excellence, they cost money — which most media organizations no longer seem to have. But if investigative journalism is a public good, shouldn’t, then, the public look to supporting it? LSU J-school dean John Maxwell Hamilton, author of Journalism’s Roving Eye, thinks so. “Like parks, soup kitchens, local opera, and educational institutions, high-quality media rarely pays for itself.”

Just as great men stand on the shoulders of giants, so too is history built on what came before. This now-elapsing decade — The Aughts, or whatever you want to call them — has been a decade of change not only compared to the decades before it, but because of them. Perhaps that’s why now, more than ever, it’s important to remember how we got here.

“What a relief to get the odious Lou Dobbs out of the news business, at least for a while.” Let’s just say that Bil Rappleye thinks his replacement with John King is a step in the right direction for CNN.

What troubles me the most about Glenn Beck is how he is slopping over into the new journalism. For those who are troubled over the lack of judgment, filters, and discipline in the handling of the new spontaneous news flows, his careless call-outs to his flock for dirt on enemies represents a new reach into chaos for the profession.

Amidst the dark days for media during the country’s latest recession, The Week has shown profit and growth for the first six months of 2009. That’s actually pretty standard for The Week, which has enjoyed profit and growth pretty much since its launch in 2001. What is it doing right?

Welcome to the fun-filled world of a start-up! For the past four weeks, we’ve taken to comparing the site to a baby: Don’t leave it alone, don’t expect much sleep, you never know what it’ll burp up. (Wordpress! How you bedevil us!). Though it’s certainly forced us to stretch in ways we weren’t expecting, we’ve enjoyed the past month — enough to look forward to sticking around for a while (sorry, Brain Trust).

Historians generally agree that Watergate was a great moment for the press – and for the Washington Post, which published the scoops of that would eventually take down a president. But the July 17th issue of the Economist points to a more unorthodox take: That the Washington Post was selfish, irresponsible, and directly responsible for thwarting the World Peace that Richard Nixon would certainly have won.

In the ruthless quest for cutting costs every which way, the practice of pooling — the assignment of a single crew to cover a routine event for several local TV stations — is taking hold in newsrooms all across the country.

In most cases, carefully handled, pooling can cover routine events adequately, with no loss in basic news service, and put the saved manpower to work on original, fresh stories. But at the same time it can make redundant — read: fireable — each station’s crew that would otherwise be on that job. These days the opportunity to cut costs can be irresistible.

While the freedom of the press guaranteed by the First Amendment has never been successfully challenged politically, it is now being challenged economically: as a practical matter, the press is not so free. So, how to pay for the vital probings on behalf of the entire polity, in this time of forced deprivation?

My name is Bill Rappleye. I’m 85. I started as a copy boy right after the war – that war, WWII – and have spent my life in journalism in the sixty-plus years since. I started at Time magazine in 1947, and worked my way up to a couple of dream assignments– Southwest: Bureau Chief [...]