Who can afford them? Along with the other costly paragons of journalistic excellence, the investigative reporters, in this new era of newspapers folding, bureaus closing, layoffs, and stifling cost controls? Hamilton quotes Donald Graham, Chairman of the Washington Post: “Sending reporters overseas costs lots of money and doesn’t add a penny to this year’s circulation or advertising revenue.” In November, Graham closed the Post’s domestic bureaus in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

“All news must be subsidized,” Hamilton finds. The traditional subsidy in the case of a mass-market newspaper or network television newscast has come mostly from advertisers (they typically have accounted for 75 percent of newspapers’ incomes). This approach supported foreign news relatively well when newspapers and broadcasters bundled together a wide array of news and entertainment in order to appeal to as many people as possible. Readers and viewers who didn’t want foreign news got some anyway along with the stuff they did want, he acknowledges. Advertisers liked this approach because it brought them large audiences of consumers for their products. But with the unbundling of the news package, in what Jack Fuller of the Chicago Tribune in 2002 described as “the ongoing fragmentation of the information environment,” the audience and the advertisers have migrated to whatever niches suited them best – and which generated survival revenues. “All traditional news delivery is imperiled because of this,” Hamilton writes. Inside the bundle, profits from the larger constituencies would cover the costs for the sections of higher institutional value and lower commercial appeal; now they don’t.

“The big question is: Who’s going to do the original news gathering?” Hamilton wonders in an interview, over the phone from Baton Rouge. “Who’s going to go out and find out stuff we don’t know? The more papers cut back on staff, the less enterprise reporting they can do and the less stuff they are going to find out. Somebody’s going to have to pick up that slack.”
.
To pick it up, he contends, “Subsidies must come from elsewhere.” He got a good idea of where when he sat in on a news meeting of the Center for Public Integrity (whose annual budgets of $5-6 million are covered by a mix of foundation grants and fundraising). “I was just blown away by the amount of really good stuff they are doing” — The Global Climate Change Lobby; Ginnie Mae’s Troubling Endorsements; Sexual Assault on Campus: A Frustrating Search for Justice; The Transportation Lobby; The Murtha Method. “I thought, that’s great, so I asked who pays for it. The answer: None of them. All of this has to be financed by philanthropy.”

Foundations like the Center and Knight have been funding specific projects, generously, and getting important, consequential stories into print and on the air, for years; Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald’s magnate Ray Kroc, made a $235 million bequest to National Public Radio in November, 2003;. ProPublica started in the fall of 2007 on a $10 million grant, primarily from the Herbert and Marion Sandler Foundation, and there has been an accelerating expansion of organizations and individuals contributing to prop-ups or start-ups in the weakening business of news.

“Much more of this can be done,” but for such efforts to be successful, Hamilton warns “donors will have to jettison a common assumption that funding should be temporary and that ventures can be self-supporting. Like parks, soup kitchens, local opera, and educational institutions, high-quality media rarely pays for itself.”

Proprietors never did consider themselves as running “eleemosynary institutions,” he concedes, even though, in their investing in the public good of excellent journalism, they were. Now it appears that, perforce, out and out philanthropy is having to do it.

Bill Rappleye has spent the last 60-plus years in journalism. Read more about him here.

40s

The news business came out of World War II a lot like the rest of the country: proud and confident. More than eyewitnesses, we were cheerleaders, too, rooters for our winning team, with our own stars: Ernie Pyle, Bill Mauldin, Ed Murrow. We trusted our victorious leaders, and even our allies, as we reported on the founding of the United Nations, and for a while eased into a routine of conventional reporting.

But not for very long.

50s

The Cold War started; the Iron Curtain had clanged down, and serious policy questions broke out;. Korea took everyone by surprise; MacArthur saved it, over reached, crossed Harry Truman, got himself fired, returned to a hero’s welcome, made a big speech, and then really did, in his own words, fade away. For the first time in years, the press was called upon to report big public controversy — still primarily in print in its traditional straightforward, structured, apparently objective way.

Joe McCarthy changed all that. He bluffed and bullied a gullible, non-challenging press into accomplices for his rampage of scare-charges of Communist subversives in government that ruined careers and wrecked, among others, the Far East sector of the State Department. This turned out to be an object lessen on press responsibility, only belatedly learned and courageously corrected by growing awareness and counter challenges, culminating in Ed Murrow’s devastating presentation of the Senator, live, in his own words.

Television started to emerge as a powerful force for institutional change, primarily as a diversion of advertising dollars, and the ultimate destruction of the evening newspapers. With the rare pioneering exceptions of fine documentaries like Murrow and Fred Friendly‘s Harvest of Shame, and attempts at meaningful public debates, and the pageantry of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, TV news was pretty much an extension of print; mostly confined to 15 minutes of Douglas Edwards and John Cameron Swayze, reading. The Nixon-Kennedy debate, though, crossed the great divide for TV news, to relevance and importance. People who heard it thought Nixon won; people who saw it, thought Kennedy won. Visual would become the primary force in journalism (as immediacy would soon become its partner).

60s

The shattering events of the 60s changed journalism, and journalists, in range and responsibilities, identity and attitude. The assassinations created an unprecedented climate of urgency, expectation, and existential uncertainty among consumers of the news; words and pictures of the riots created an intimacy with shock. In that context the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby on live TV is the historic flash point. People saw history actually happen.

Coverage of the struggle for civil rights, though, brought about the most fundamental change in journalism, as events like sit-ins; live pictures of the beatings of Freedom Riders; Bull Connor, fire hoses, and police dogs at Pettus Bridge changed the attitudes of the nation, their expectations from journalism, and the role of reporters from observers to sympathizers. They became engaged in their stories, and as they did, erased the ephemeral claim to objectivity.

Politics turned rough, at least partly to exploit the divisiveness and fear. Cops and dissenters turned the 1968 Democratic Convention into a near-riot, including the arrest and formal removal of reporters from the floor. Spiro Agnew railed against Nattering Nabobs of Negativism. SDS spawned the underground press, with publications like the LA Free Press and the Berkeley Barb. Tom Wolfe led the way into the highly subjective New Journalism, and Teddy White set new standards for depth and understanding in political reporting.

The news business explored new ranges, less violent, to report. Rachel Carson opened the way to environmental reporting with Silent Spring; Betty Friedan to gender politics with The Feminine Mystique. Hugh Hefner offered the idea of Playboy to Hearst, which turned him down; he went on to do it himself. Cosmopolitan hired Helen Gurley Brown, the editor who turned sex (and eventually prurience) into an overwhelming global publishing commodity.

70s

Advances in applications of technology shaped the news business. Creation of the satellite and the advent of cable enabled Ted Turner to stitch together the Superstation, which made fans of the Atlanta Braves across the country, and got him the money and new skills, to go with his genius gumption, to start CNN – all news, all the time, all over the world. HBO made the first global real-time show of a major event with the Thrilla in Manila (Ali-Frazier), and became the first TV network to continuously deliver signals via satellite.

Publication of the Pentagon Papers, essentially an academic exercise, was an enormous historic advance — and a very brave one — in the affirmation of the press’s duty to challenge authority. Watergate, only months later, equally historic, equally brave, was an essentially professional journalistic exercise — advancing in practice from basic shoe-leather reporting to “follow the money” — to the same end. “At the beginning, I don’t think Kay Graham and Ben Bradlee had the foggiest notion of what it would turn into,” recalls one competitor from that time. “It was just very good reporting, and it drove us nuts.”

At the same time, challenge to authority was being expressed in Viet Nam, where reporters — professional descendants of the proud eyewitnesses of earlier wars — held official pronouncements in contempt. They came to call the daily briefings The Five O’Clock Follies; Harrison Salisbury reported from Hanoi; Sy Hersh reported the My Lai massacre; and Walter Cronkite’s commentary famously caused Lyndon Johnson to concede that this was a war he could not win.

Affirmations of basic principle aside, historic adjustments were being made on the commercial and operational sides. Newspapers were losing their near-monopolistic claim to revenue from news. Families, once proud and comfortable in their stewardship, were finding the capital costs of keeping up, the threat to future profits, and generational dissent, all creating good reasons to sell to money-minded chains , where reality dictated that cost control weighed heavily against pricey journalism..

News was growing into a powerful money-maker for TV, and producing star-wattage personalities, who were making a lot of that money for themselves. The defining event was the hiring of Barbara Walters from NBC by ABC for the first million-dollar contract for a journalist, and altered many a career objective.

80s

The Reagan years were big for news, with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, Iran Contra, and the Challenger disaster, but a lot less dramatic for the media business itself.

Less dramatic, yes, but powerfully significant for the quality of reporting that: the enormous range and capacity for research created. The Internet was just getting started, and the organizing of research into ready accessibility, was making instantly available unprecedented depth and quality of fact, context, and interpretation.

90s

It was a fat time for television, where news as entertainment brought in new highs in profit, and made millionaire celebrities of its stars. Crossfire began, and talking heads became loud, shrill, and profitably entertaining.

The task of filling the giant 24/7 hole with news stretched severely thin the quality of journalism, though. For all its value, the Internet’s capability to move things quickly without full sourcing and to distribute them widely, facilitated the deterioration. The need to fill the hole invited superficiality and scandal, opened space for wild opinionating, put a premium on commentary over reporting, created a preference for anticipation and intolerance for explanation. The O.J. Simpson murder trial set the scandal meter at an all-time high – until the Clinton scandals overtook it, and made Drudge the dominant personality in the media world. Historic, in a way. Washington reporters wondered why the reporting on sex scandals was wide open now, when as recently as Jack Kennedy, it was simply not done.

The newspaper world obsessed with figuring out how to get back the revenues they lost to Craig’s List, and many of them could not. Real panic started to set in. Preparations began for the Aughts and dark days to come of layoffs, buyouts, and closings. Technologists — masters of the new universe of algorithms — got ready to take over.

And they did.

I did not quote anyone by name, except for Paul Starr, but I would like to acknowledge the great help from the following, in preparation of this post: Paul Starr, Stephen Engelberg, Ralph Engelman, Charles Bierbauer, Bob Semple, Alex Jones, John Darnton, Rachel Rich Fine, Geneva Overholser, Elliot King, Sidney Offitt, .Jim Srodes, Tom Fleming and Geoff Smith.

Bill Rappleye has spent the last 60-plus years in journalism. Read more about him here.

CNN/US President Jonathan Klein has been making the choice clear to Dobbs for some weeks: Objective, or out. Yesterday, all of a sudden, he let Dobbs make his own announcement: he was leaving CNN “to engage in constructive problem solving.” Somewhere else.

Better than Dobbs’ departure, though, is the choice of his replacement. John King, straight-story minded basic reporter, up from AP, lead political reporter for the network, in a powerful move to reclaim the tarnished CNN brand for non-partisan reporting. Geneva Overholser, director of the school of Journalism at the University of Southern California, concurs, she told the New York Times: “If CNN wants to be seen as the thoughtful, unbiased, middle-of-the-road alternative, this decision goes along with that.”

Indeed it does. Even with Dobbs in the prime slot, CNN was outscored in the ratings by the polemics Fox on the right and MSNBC on the left. But its precious non-partisan reputation has been the core for double-digit growth of a worldwide empire of international networks and wholesale news reports, web site, wire services. It is hiring, and this month is opening a new production facility in Abu Dhabi. “That’s what we deliver around the world,” Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide, told David Bauder of AP. “We compete against a lot more than Fox and MSNBC.”

King for Dobbs beefs up that batting order.

Bill Rappleye has spent the last 60-plus years in journalism. Read more about him here.

But this guy is different. What troubles me the most about him is how he is slopping over into the new journalism. He implores his devotees to go out and dig up dirt on enemies of his current true beliefs — a new organizing principle for the swamp of citizen journalists, with himself in the new role of assignment editor for the curious, angry and fearful. For those who are troubled over the lack of judgment, filters, and discipline in the handling of the new spontaneous news flows, this careless call-out represents a new reach into chaos for the profession.

“At a time when the news business continues to rate very low on the scales of trust, how can confidence be regained by its use of demonstrably untrustworthy methods?”

Yet isn’t it part of the hope for the interactive new journalism, that we reach out more and more to the readers/viewers/listeners of the news, for their contributions to it and engagement with it? Many important stories have begun with tips from frustrated non-journalists — specialists, enthusiastic amateurs, vigilantes, outraged insiders. Now Beck is of a mind to turn a crowd of solo whistle-blowers, each subject to some careful evaluation, into a wild cacophony of loud-hailers, undiscernible. Which may, worryingly, embolden the news business to use this method as a new way to prove its value.

It certainly got results with ACORN — the blast from Beck touched off by the reporting of non-journalists got action from Congress, which had been desultory in its inquiries into the charges against it. And what do you think would have happened if Harry Markapolis had blown his whistle through Glenn Beck, instead of huffing and puffing to the SEC about Bernard Madoff? That could be good. But what happens when he megaphones a bad call? Who can clean up the mess? Not him, for sure.

Yes, editors and reporters have made bad calls and failed to report properly, but the system as a whole, through their peers and colleagues, calls them to account, and the record gets set straight. But a non-correcting hit-and-run system of aroused like-minded amateurs can’t get that job done.

Another main thing that bothers me about Beck is his revelation of the risk of using non-professionals to make his point. The two neophytes who blew up ACORN bit on a lie — the woman who confessed to murder — even as they brought out truth in the advice they got in how to set up a whorehouse for underaged illegal aliens. Sting operations have been vital to the start of many an important story, up to and including members of Congress; but the Glenn Beck exposés are downright scary in their demonstration of the risks they pose in the hands of zealous non-professionals.

At a time when the news business continues to rate very low on the scales of trust, how can confidence be regained by its use of demonstrably untrustworthy methods? Sure, a juicy scandal fully reported will win plaudits from the winners; but a blown case will rightly confirm the doubters. And over time, the engagement in journalism of a slob job like Beck will do nothing to advance the appreciation of high standards and professionalism in presenting the issues for public deliberation — as the news business strains for ways to advance within its charter for public responsibility, in its kaleidoscopic new world, and will assuredly set it back a lot.

Bill Rappleye has spent the last 60-plus years in journalism and writes the Old Guard column for Mediaite. Read more about him here.

Smug, perhaps. But not to be dismissed. For people who are trying desperately to think of any ways possible to cope, survive, even prosper in the erupting, exploding, futuristic new world of journalism, the idea of salvation among the stupid might be worth some consideration.

But wait a second. The Week, one of the eleven, is far from stupid. Simplified, yes, but only in regard to how it delivers content from across a wide range of sources: Every major national newspaper and many minor ones; political magazines like The New Republic, The Nation, and The Weekly Standard; sites like Slate, Salon and Politico; numerous foreign publications. Disagree as you may with some of these titles, you would be hard-pressed to describe them as “stupid.”

Nor would that describe how The Week has been run. It’s been a powerhouse from its start in 2001, growing circulation from 100,000 to 150,000 in 2003, 200,000 in 2004, 400,000 in 2006, 500,000 now, all the while doubling its revenue. It’s also a powerhouse under control. In 2006 “we realized that if we kept our price at $30 a year, we would wind up heading towards a million circ,” President Steve Kotok told me. “We just didn’t think that that was best for our business, so we raised the price to $50, and kind of moderated our growth, and reaped a lot more revenue. Kept our ad rates high, too – raising them, not cutting them, as we hear other people are doing.” Its circulation subsequently went up.

How could they do that? Editors, he says. Call them curators, mediators, selectors, disciplinarians taming the flood of aggregators – it’s their job to cull the best (or most provocative) reporting and analysis from around the world in a slim, digestible package for The Week‘s busy – but enlightened – readers. “The Week is not for everyone,” says Kotok, who defines his readers as “the thoughtful, opinion leader type – frankly elitist.” “Most people can go to their Google news and that’s good enough for them. Fine. But our readers are the ones who check the Google News and it might not be enough. They haven’t gotten the context, the perspective, the opinion. Those are our readers, that 5 percent of the people who want more…. Quite simply, we believe our editors are going to make a better selection of content for that reader than an algorithm or a Google or the wisdom of crowds.”

Nor does The Week overload the reader with this selection of the best: It limits edit pages to 34 per edition, no matter what. “We used to formally limit advertising,” Kotok recalls. “Now we structurally limit it by keeping our rates high, raising them every year, and not breaking our format to change it for an advertiser –to keep the focus on the reader. At a lot of magazines, if the ad guy has a good month they have to go write more editorial, and if he has a bad month, they cut some. From our point of view, it seems strange how a magazine could decide: Hey the car advertisers are coming back, so let’s do 20 more pages of edit. Or, the car advertisers went away so let’s cut pages. What’s the value you put on edit if you just cut it and add it according to advertising pages? It’s not just the stuff on the back of the ads.

“We start with exactly what we think a busy person has time for, and we just don’t vary that. If we don’t sell any ads, or if we sell 20 ad pages, doesn’t matter: We still give the reader 34 edit pages. In fact, we limit the number of ad pages so they don’t get too intrusive. We give the reader the package that we think is appropriate”

That’s all pretty lofty and idealistic, old fashioned and quaint. It can come off as pompous, even, and maybe not particularly relevant in the frenzied mosh pit of “how are we going to make it?” But Kotok produces impressive readership studies of opinion leaders from Erdos & Morgan, which successively rate The Week number one as the most credible and most objective.

Kotok has worked for Felix Dennis, wildly smart, entrepreneurial, volatile owner of The Week in a stable of more than 50 titles — digital magazines, websites in the US, UK, and Australia, among them Kung Fu monthly, a string of computer magazines, and Maxim, the first of the super-popular lad books — for 14 years. “So it’s hard for me to speak for other publications, but it seems to me ours is a kind of long-term strategy vs. a short-term strategy. In any one year, cuts in subscription prices and ad rates might enable you to do better, but over a long term it’s certainly harder to maintain reader value,” Kotok says. “But Felix plans to keep on owning this property, and he doesn’t want to do anything to reduce the value of this asset. Long term, he believes you’re always better off focusing on the reader, building trust and loyalty, for maximum value to advertisers.”

Which, amid a kaleidoscope of ever-bursting uncertainties, in his condescended, old-fashioned way, is just what he’s doing, pretty well.

Bill Rappleye has spent the last 60-plus years in journalism. Read more about him here.

Mediaite

It’s not just because we want to see who finagles their way to the top of the Power Grid (Meacham, watch your back, Stengel’s comin’ for you!) – could it be that we actually….like this? Alas, early a.m. emails and chocolate/candy consumption aside, we do – it’s hard not to when we’re publishing gems from Ruthie Frieds to KatieBakes, to Bill Rappleye (there may be a few decades between them) — with a few Panel Nerds thrown in for good measure.  It’s hard not to when “work” involves something like Office Hours (two words: JEWISH SINGING). It’s hard not to with Dan Abrams standing over our desks every day telling us what to write. Kidding! That was just to see if you were paying attention.

Speaking of attention, thank you, dear readers, for yours — after one month, we’re pleased to have clocked 1.2 million pageviews, with pickup from Perez Hilton to Paul Krugman, Howard Stern to the White House, Martha to MuggleNet. (Is it bad that I was most excited about MuggleNet?) And also, sports people and sports stuff! See, we weren’t just in it for the fish!

No, we’re in it for love —and money, of course. It’s never been a better time for media! But actually, we’re sorta in this for the love. After a month, we’ve actually had a pretty hilarious time. Our team is small but busy and excited to keep on trying new things, and our contributors are perceptive and entertaining. And, not to brag, but we really do have the best freaking interns in the business. Words cannot express, but their Twitter feed is a good start. You should come visit our office, you’ll see. We have candy. And a hula-hoop. It’s like Talk magazine circa 1999! Hm, perhaps not the best metaphor. Let’s just take that asterisk from the headline and put it here.* But hey, it gives us at least another month. So please stick with us until then!

In the meantime, please enjoy this photo gallery – “A Month of Mediaite” – featuring a selection of images from our launch and first month of existence. Thanks again for your feedback, constructive criticism and support.

Related:

Mediaite Columnists
5QQ – Five Quick Questions
Office Hours
Mediaite Jobs Board!
Photogallery: A Month of Mediaite

Photo of Little Baby Mediaite via weblogs.wpix.com. If your baby is cuter, send us a pic at tips@mediaite.com.

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.

Huh?

In an otherwise laudatory review of a new book, Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year, by Alistair Horne, a distinguished British historian, The Economist’s reviewer found a stunning denial of one of journalism’s historic triumphs:

“The author’s worst failing is his total misunderstanding of Watergate. He interprets it as self-interested irresponsibility on the part of the Washington Post, exploited by Democratic politicians for partisan purposes. For him, their frivolity robbed the world of peace made possible by Mr. Nixon’s flawed strategic genius and Mr. Kissinger’s brilliant diplomacy.

When Americans speak of Watergate, they are referring not only to the break-in at the Watergate building, but the whole course of illegal behaviour that Mr Nixon encouraged to improve his chances of winning the 1972 election. This was paranoid folly; he would have won anyway. Far from being wrong, it was brave and public-spirited of the Washington Post to investigate conduct that threatened the integrity of American democracy.”

It’s a fairly extraordinary claim, and oddly, one that escaped the notice of Jacob Heilbrunn when he reviewed the book for the New York Times the weekend before last. What Heilbrunn did note, interestingly, was that Horne may have been perceived as a biographer more inclined to see things in Kissinger’s favor:

Kissinger has always been acutely sensitive to criticism, and he miscalculated by providing Walter Isaacson full access for a 1992 biography, which was supposed to counterbalance Seymour Hersh’s withering 1983 account, “The Price of Power.” It didn’t. Then came Christopher Hitchens’s “Trial of Henry Kissinger” (2001). Turning to two British historians with conservative pedigrees must have seemed the prudent way to restore order: Horne explains that in 2004 he met with Kissinger, whom he has known for almost three decades, and proposed confining himself to 1973, thereby allowing the equally prolific Niall Ferguson, who extolled Kissinger last year in The Times Literary Supplement, to work unmolested on a forthcoming official life.

If, indeed, Horne was favorably disposed to paint Kissinger in a flattering light, this is indeed an extreme example. I’ll let the Economist have the last word: “To believe that but for the irresponsibility of the Washington Post and the Ervin Committee he would have bequeathed the world a generation of world peace, is too much.”

Related:
A year to remember [The Economist]
Got Your Back [NYT]
Excerpt: Kissinger: 1973, the Crucial Year [NYT]

Bill Rappleye has spent the last 60-plus years in journalism. Read more about him here.

In some cases, it makes a lot of sense.  Who needs a fleet of helicopters to cover a car chase?  Or major capital investment in your own weather radar, when all the basic information comes out of the U.S. weather service?

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.  Good stations will naturally try to make creative use of those freed-up teams, but these days the opportunity to cut costs can be irresistible.

But in most cases,  the efficiencies of pooling can also lead to pernicious unintended consequences, warns Jill Geisler, head of the Poynter Institute’s Leadership and Management Group. The concept of pooling has been around for a long time, she acknowledges, but mainly for extraordinary events that were “lengthy, visually identical. If we all shot them ourselves, we’d all have the same thing.” (Think: Michael Jackson’s funeral.) These organizations could have been pooling for years. Why did they choose not to? “Because at the end of the day you want to produce a newscast that is distinctive, even when you’re covering the same story as everyone else. Now, the driving force of this change today is the belief that it’s economical, that it will save money.”

As a habit, pooling directly leads to a deterioration in the quality of journalism. Members of a pooled team have little incentive to work the rooms for contacts, chatter, and story development, since the results are common and indistinct; spinners and  promoters will stage events  (conferences, presentations) set up for unquestioning, even stenographic, coverage; pool players will lose competitive edge with non-poolers. That’s a loss of quality that may be infinitesimal and unmeasurable  in each event, but as it becomes common and pervasive, will drastically affect value in journalism. Which, I guess, doesn’t  really matter much to the  bean counters,  but really should get the attention of the keepers of the journalism flame.

The practice is metastasizing. “I suspect that over the next few years you’re going to see more cities in which one station produces news for multiple stations to run,” Geisler predicts. It has already happened — twice, on the same day last March — in a joint swap and cut deal. In Syracuse, Barrington Broadcasting’s NBC affiliate WSTM simply replaced the work of its rival crew at Granite Broadcasting’s CBS affiliate WTVH — just fired the whole staff, and now runs the WSTM news show on both stations. Same thing in Peoria: Granite’s NBC affiliate WEEK filled the news slot at Barrington’s ABC affiliate WHCH and dumped the redundant staff. Net loss: 70 jobs. (sadly apt headline: “It Doesn’t Play In Peoria“). In each city the news produced by one station now appears on two. In their joint press release, Barrington CEO Jim Yaeger and Granite CEO Don Cornwell played up the deal as a “joining of forces” that “provides opportunities… to expand the breadth of local news and services.”

“If the station that shuts down was just in the business of providing news to create an attractive environment for news-related advertisers, and they weren’t really committed to having a staff sufficient to doing a good job of developing their own news, and they now decide even that minimum service is not worth the cost, they just enter an agreement to have their news produced by another station,” says Geisler. “What you’re losing is a fairly weak journalism center,” she concedes, ” but you are losing one voice in a community, nonetheless.”

Yet the consequences of pooling among rival stations actually creates a competitive advantage for the station that can afford — or insists upon — the opportunity to compete on quality. Emily Barr, President and General Manager of ABC’s WLS, the largest station in the fierce Chicago market, chose not to join the local pool. “There’s already a criticism of local news, that we are all similar, that we tend to do the same stories,” she explains. “The only way to distinguish one station from another is the stories it selects, and how it crafts the stories that it chooses. Those distinctions, subtle though they may be, over time, are going to make you watch one station over another. So I thought it would be a disservice to us as the leading station in the market to pool video that would then create a kind of sameness. If you have people who know the right way, and can get the right shots at the right angles and put it all together, it is a very beautiful dance. And I don’t want to share that with anyone else.”

Pooling may not even pay off in its avowed mission of cost cutting, notes Barr. Obviously it can’t help the poolers in the ratings race, but it may be something of a false economy, too. The cost of shooting video is not the most expensive part of a news operation, she points out. “It’s one small piece of the pie, and yes, pooling might allow a station to cut back a little. But photographers cost less than reporters, and there are fewer of them, so cutting two or three crews out of a station’s budget, is that really going to save you a tremendous amount of money? Probably not.”

Kevin Benz, News Director of News8Austin, Tex, owned by Time Warner Cable, has also opted out of the local pool, and makes the same points: “Local TV, for long enough, has taken the slings and arrows of being shallow and surface and all of those things, and that’s only getting worse because packaged links are getting shorter – and now pooling video? It absolutely is a threat to the quality of journalism. Look,” he says. “If four stations pool their coverage of the Texas Independence Day Parade it will look exactly the same on all four stations. But if one station, covering on its own, walking alongside the parade, found a person whose ancestors fought on the Mexican side and is now an immigrant activist? You see what I mean?”

Bill Rappleye has spent the last 60-plus years in journalism. Read more about him here.

In the hard new priorities of news management, dwindling resources struggle to keep coverage alive on essential routine beats, while the public-interest side of the business — investigative journalism,  the very heart and soul of journalism — is being unforgivably squeezed in the face of fiscal realities.

So, how to pay for the vital probings on behalf of the entire polity, in this time of forced deprivation?  Philanthropy, perhaps?  The success of the pioneer ProPublica — the non-profit independent newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest, with “moral force” — bodes well.

Launched last year, ProPublica is funded by a multi-year, $10 million budget from the Herbert and Marion Sandler Foundation, supported by the MacArthur Foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and the Kohlberg Foundation, with pro bono counsel support from Cleary Gottlieb and Davis Wright Tremaine. It is led by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, and Stephen Engelberg, former  managing editor of the Portland Oregonian and investigative editor of the New York Times. Their staff consists of  32 top-flight journalists (eight of them winners of Pulitzers), individually and collectively way beyond the pay scales of the publications they seek to serve. They range wide over their specialties, find leads, investigate, research, and produce original stories — which they offer exclusively, free, to the local news organizations where they will have the most impact.

From a standing start, they have done a spectacular job. ProPublica has already provided more than 40 publishing partners with original  reports of consequence.  One on the environmental damage caused by hydrofracking — the practice of injecting toxic fluids underground in the process of natural gas drilling — was picked up by the Albany Times-Union, Business Week, the Denver Post, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The story has touched off a fierce debate in Congress over  extension of  the extraordinary legal exemption for the practice.

Another, on California’s failure to check the criminal backgrounds  of 195,000 health-care professionals, published in the Los Angeles Times, prompted the state Department of Consumer Affairs to add 104,000  professionals from all levels of medical care — doctors, dentists, psychiatric technicians — to that total, and spurred the state into remedial action. ProPublica’s ongoing investigative efforts into the California health care system this week resulted in Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger replacing most of the State Nursing Board.

Elsewhere in the country, ProPublica posted an update on its earlier story published in The Nation about vigilantism in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina:  new video footage has surfaced about one of the murders, in which the police may have been involved.

So far, ProPublica has brought more than 50 similar heretofore secret stories into public view in its first year in business. And counting.

And, apparently, just in time. “We don’t pretend to be a substitute for all the resources that are being lost,” says Dick Tofel, ProPublica’s general manager from its inception. “Many, many millions of dollars, many scores of people. It’s a national tragedy. We can’t fix that by ourselves, but we can push back, and perhaps ultimately serve as one model  for how you can build a non-profit news organization that may be replicable, for instance, at the local or regional level around the country.”

Tofel’s sense of urgency comes from what he perceives to be the core of “investigative journalism,” as he defines it: “It is the stories that someone in some position of power wants to keep secret. What investigative journalism is about is getting those stories that people in some position of power want to keep from being told. If one can accept that definition, then I think one can quickly understand why it is a very important function of self government.”

Tofel cites David Simon, former journalist and creator of The Wire on HBO, whose comments while testifying before Congress earlier this year at the “Future of Journalism” hearing echoed around the industry:  “The next 10 or 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption.“

Well, not if ProPublica can help it. Tofel, Steiger and Engelberg aim to be around for those 10 to 15 years, and then some. “We all agree it’s an integrated whole: If you just do great content it’s not enough; if you just have great staff it’s not enough; if you just have distribution it’s not enough,” says Tofel. “It’s a system you need to build; it’s a machine you need to construct, and then to maintain on the fly.”

To that end, they are building it. First priority:  recruit and retain a first-rate staff.  (“Very pleased about that,” says Tofel. “Not 100 percent done, but close.”) Indeed: Pro Publica just added Jesse Eisinger, formerlyof Portfolio and the Wall Street Journal, and this past spring added online and organizing savvy with Amanda Michel, the former director of “Off The Bus,” the Huffington Post’s citizen journalism arm. Second priority: Do great work. Tofel is modest (“I think we’ve started to do some, but we need to do years of it  before people can start assessing”), but the California State Nursing Board might beg to differ.  Third: Distribute effectively. No need for modesty there. Says Tofel:  “We’ve already proven that.”

With work of such incredible public value, it seems almost depressing that it traditional business models can’t support it. But, says Tofel, that’s why now is the time to shake things up. “I think we’re at a moment of cataclysmic change here; there’s a need for a lot of real experimentation,” he says. “I do think that philanthropy can catalyze a lot of experimentation that needs to be done. We are about to get more systematic about what a sustainable long-term funding model would look like and go out to try to build one. I have more questions than answers about that, very honestly. I don’t have answers.  All I will tell you is that we’ve been publishing just a year now, and I think this is the next big thing for us to do.”

Like the rest of their investigations, we look forward to the results.

Bill Rappleye has spent the last 60-plus years in journalism. Read more about him here.

Are they important-sounding today? Less so, and the dream assignments are changing. But the reasons we want to take them on are not. Jefferson set them out back in 1816, and in my view they are no less important today:

“The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves, nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.”

Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe. Sounds simple, but there are a lot of ifs in there. What if the press isn’t free – because no one can afford to run it? How can we trust that “information”? Can tracking “the functionaries of government” be entrusted to citizen journalists? I’ve seen change in my time, but this seems…different. Back then, I was flat-out focused on the work at hand, noticing, if not particularly involved in, the ways journalism changed in the various ways it was delivered. Enormous as they were – radio grew up, TV shouldered it aside, radio recovered, TV overwhelmed photo journalism, cable muscled its way into the picture — they were wrenching to the sectors, but not crippling to the calling.

Now, though, the very living of the calling is under threat — or maybe promise. This wild new world of change — in resources, standards, economics, reach, form and focus — is already making big differences in the way the profession works. Frantic speculation, concern (or not) over consequences, experiments wacky or wonderful…What in the world is going on?

That is what I will try to explore in this column, framed by my 60 years in the business, reporting on the big-picture thinking of giants like Walter Wriston, David Rockefeller, Paul Volcker, Lew Preston, Robert McNamara (at the World Bank), Don Rumsfeld (at Searle), Jack Welch, Steve Bechtel (even, in an earlier incarnation, Bear Bryant). Bill Simon told me “The Shah of Iran is a nut”, in a candid departure from policy talk; Arthur Burns, short of change, borrowed ten pfennigs from me to use for an Austrian pay toilet (he offered to pay it back, but I told him I’d rather have the Chairman of the Fed owe it to me); After 60 years of that old-fashioned reporting, though, I don’t have any answers for how it is done now. I have missed growing up in this Internet, texting and blogging and Twittering and New Journalism. But I sure have questions about how it is done, and what effects these historic advances in technology are having on the performance, quality, and possible changes in the originating purpose of the news business. Big questions, being raised by smart young people. One of whom, Rachel Sklar, did this Old Guard a considerable favor – one more dream assignment – by asking me to participate in this new media by asking those big questions about it, every week.

————

Rappleye Recommends: Fred Friendly was the bullying genius who burst into TV journalism at the very beginning, more than 50 years ago. Remembered, to whatever fading degree, mostly as the producer-partner of Edward R. Murrow, he was the one who brought to life the stirring forms of the new medium – the documentaries, the personalizations, the great debates – that made CBS the Tiffany Network, and set standards that have been honored, sadly, less often in the observance than in the breach, ever since. Thank goodness there’s a new book about him, that captures the embattled vision, even heroism, and excitement of his immense career. It is Friendlyvision: Fred Friendly and the Rise and Fall of Television Journalism, by Ralph Engelman, Columbia University Press — a brilliant, exciting recall of how greatness was achieved – and perhaps, by inference, a mirror for its erosion and diminution, over the years…