The future direction of news gathering

During the past year, I’ve been thinking about the layoffs in the journalism field as I noted a significant decline in local news stories here in central Connecticut. More and more, you see stories outsourced to other news organizations, or in many cases, no local news at all.

During the past three weeks, the Hartford Courant’s online edition has covered a whopping five stories from Windsor Locks. Not exactly what you would call in-depth local news coverage. Anyway, Dave Kopel, who writes for the Rocky Mountain News and The Volokh Conspiracy has an interesting piece about where some news outlets are turning to to fill column inches at low cost.

Kopel’s piece first mentions the current popularity of Op-Eds since – in most cases – they do not have to pay the writers who submit them. Later in the post, he notes that some articles billed as investigative journalism are written by biased sources, and offered to outlets for free.

Describing a piece in the Denver Post, Kopel writes:

The front page featured a huge, 39-paragraph article titled “Alarm over water supply.” The article was an investigative piece about alleged environmental harm caused by a particular process – hydraulic fracturing – involved in natural gas extraction.

Normally, in-depth investigative reporting is very costly for a newspaper. The article may requires days or weeks of work by at least one reporter, and many articles use more than one reporter. But for The Post, the article was free.

It was supplied, gratis, by ProPublica. ProPublica describes itself as an “independent, nonprofit” organization. It is subsidized by the billionaire Sandler family, who are generous donors to a variety of leftist groups, such as ACORN. ProPublica hires journalists to write investigative articles and gives its product away for free to mainstream media. The general theme of ProPublica’s work is that the government is not doing a good enough job in controlling things, particularly things involving big business.

Will we see more of this type of propaganda passed off as news in the future? Who knows, but back to local news coverage for a moment.

The lack of local town coverage combined with the Internet age and free content management systems like WordPress provide a great opportunity for high schools to start Internet based news Web sites and a distributive news service model.

Students can learn about journalism, cover local stories, share those stories with neighboring towns, sell advertising, make a few dollars for the school and maybe put a few dollars into their own pockets.

They may even lear how to write effectively.

Not saying that I do all that well myself 😉

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Steve McGough

Steve's a part-time conservative blogger. Steve grew up in Connecticut and has lived in Washington, D.C. and the Bahamas. He resides in Connecticut, where he’s comfortable six months of the year.

9 Comments

  1. Louis Palshaw on December 29, 2008 at 8:54 am

    Small local papers are doing a good job with local news in small to medium towns in Connecticut. Three good examples are the the Glastonbury Citizen, The Riverview East and the Journal Inquirer.
    The Glastonbury Citizen and Riverview East are both published by the Glastonbury Citizen. The Glastonbury Citizen is a weekly paper at a reasonable cost the Riverview East is a weekly paper distributed at no cost. Both cover news important to the towns they serve and have lively letters to the editor pages. The Journal is a daily and covers international, national and local news.



  2. Wyndeward on December 29, 2008 at 9:20 am

    On the other hand, there are those papers on the other side of the river that they want to shower some state wealth upon to keep them afloat…



  3. Chris on December 29, 2008 at 9:27 am

    Right Wyndeward, New Britain Herald subscibers in the neighboring burbs dropped their subscriptions when the publication stopped sending reporters to cover town meetings and other news in Berlin, Nwngtn, So., Plnvlle, etc.



  4. Anne-EH on December 29, 2008 at 9:33 am

    Plus another excellent local newspaper which knows what journelism excellence is the Waterbury Republican. It is to the west of the river as the Manchester Journel Inquier is to the east of the river.



  5. Dimsdale on December 29, 2008 at 1:13 pm

    The Springfield "Republican" is nothing but an extension of AP.



  6. russ on December 29, 2008 at 1:14 pm

    I am developing a big miss trust for news
    as if seem to be all about the BAD
    are you telling me nothing good is happening
    even when something goes right
    it all WRONG
    ITS the worst since!



  7. Linda Mae on December 29, 2008 at 7:44 pm

    Both the Journal Inquirer and the Courant ran articles about Lieberman's poll numbers. Both stated that his popularity was @ 43%. No references were made as to how much better this number was when compared to Pelosi, Reid, et al. Neither did either article state the most important stat!!! The % of those who would vote for him AGAIN was @60%. That was the most important thing, I thought . To omit it smacks of media bias. The JI massages the facts to prove its point that Obama reigns supreme. The Courant is not much better. I do read the Springfield Republican and think it far surpasses either paper. I only wish they had CT news. I thought coverage of the UTC "divorce" on the first page was proof that the paper no longer has journalistic standards. Oh, well. It is up to us to continue to complain so that they know the aren't fooling all of the people all of the time. I think they do think they are.



  8. Rick - WH on December 30, 2008 at 8:24 pm

    I have noted the same result for West Hartford and nearby towns as well.

    If you really want to get sick about the cuts of local news, stop in at your local library and take a peek at the microfilm versions of the Courant from some time in the past.

    I recently had to do this for a certain day in the early 1960s. In the New Britain edition (yes, there was one), there were multiple full pages of local news including community announcements, etc.

    The Courant and other "local" papers have gone a long way – the wrong way.

    On television, here is what is coming, One person news crews, much like they do at News 12 (I believe) , etc. So, the "reporter" will do it all – including the camera and sound work. This is now happening at WUSA-TV9 in Washington, DC and in other major markets. Salaries of even some high profile reporters are being slashed.

    I wonder, will they also have to drive and operate the satellite truck?
    http://mobile.washingtonpost.com/detail.jsp?key=3

    WUSA-TV9 is the CBS affiliate in Washington, DC and is owned by Gannett, publishers of USA Today. It is now the lowest rated news operation in the nation's capital – although it was number one for years.



  9. DJH on January 2, 2009 at 8:57 am

    Unfortunately the dilution of journalism is not new. It's just reached the point where it's obvious. For a couple of decades now, the media at all levels — from the smallest community papers, all the way up to global mass-media outlets — have increasingly relied primarily on press releases for their news.

    That's when some person or group issues a press release, the media services pick it up, paste most of the release's text into a story, and churn it out. It used to be that reporters researched news on their own, wrote their own copy from scratch, and really investigated. That is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

    Why have they done this? Because 1) it's easy, and 2) it's cheap. Need I say more?

    In addition to "press-release journalism," however, the media have found another venue from which they can extract stories … blogs. While a lot of folks are welcoming the advent of "citizen journalism," I'm not sure bloggers can be counted as "journalists." They typically possess tunnel vision and move inside of an ideological straitjacket.

    Eventually there will no longer be any true "journalists" investigating stories and creating news on an objective basis. All news will come from interested or biased sources. The media outlets will become, essentially, merely relays conveying what these sources write — much of it self-promotional or ideologically-generated — to the public, mostly as-is. Blogs will continue as an adjunct to this in addition to being sources, occasionally adding bits of new information, but mostly acting as a massive bullhorn for their own interests (whatever those may be), amplifying the already self-serving stories that the media relayed, or criticizing those of the opposition reflexively and without regard for the facts.

    Instead of well-researched, analytical stories that delve beneath the surface, we will get only subjectively-reported news, which generally cannot be trusted as truthful. We'll end up in a massive grand-melee or battle-royal, a vast cacaphony of wailing voices, and have to sift through it ourselves in order to determine the truth … although in many instances this will be impossible to discern, since those who possess the truth may be the last ones to want it divulged.

    Welcome to the new Information Age, folks. Facts no longer matter … subjective satisfaction with the stories themselves, does. I can think of no greater danger to civilization.



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