One problem (of many) is that police abuse disproportionally affects those of lower socio-economic status. So, those who have the power to do something about it have below-average personal motivations. Certainly, Bill Gates isn't at great risk for contracting malaria, and he's still doing something about it. However, the average upper-middle class American probably thinks police misconduct is a much less serious problem than someone living in an inner-city housing project.
As a teenager, I was always shocked at how rude police were to me; they seemed to have no respect for the laws they were supposedly there to enforce. However, as a 30-something, even when getting a speeding ticket, the police are generally polite. Have the police changed, or have they started treating me as someone who might have some power to keep them in check?
I think it was Philip Greenspun who originally said it, but I could be wrong. "How you're treated by the police is primarily determined by their expectation of you having access to a lawyer."
At the age of 14, I used to carry a Commodore 64 to my friend's house, and once the police stopped me thinking I was a burglar, and I showed them this thing with circuit boards hanging off, and said 'Would I steal THIS?'. It was pretty funny. I also ranted on about being a 'law-abiding citizen', which helped.
There is good work being done by internet writers. For example, Radley Balko's stories have gotten more than one corrupt prosecutor fired. His efforts at exposing phony forensic experts in Mississippi could lead to many freed innocent men:
I've rarely seen newspapers conduct that kind of journalism, especially on the national level. Another example: Balko has been almost single-handedly raising awareness about the death and violence that occurs from the military-style raids that many police departments use to arrest suspects of non-violent crimes. I haven't heard any newspapers tracking that story:
Unfortunately I don't know of any profitable way to provide local news without having it subsidized by classifieds, car ads, real estate ads, etc. Newspapers used to be profitable because they dominated all these things. But on the web, they become detached. Ebay and craigslist can efficiently serve many places and scale up effectively. But it's hard to watch the police in 100 major cities at once.
How much money would people pay to provide the service of watching the police? I'm afraid the answer is... not much. It has to be tied to something else, or to have a nonprofit structure.
The structure for controls is there. It just needs a fix. Write your representatives.
Journalism backed by advertisement pushing consumerism isn't a valid democratic institution, IMHO. It doesn't represent anything. As a control system it is a travesty, you don't vote them and you have to pay for access. And then it forces candidates to be press-visible with the same marketing machine, with the same backers.
Full government transparency is required, not just rhetoric. The technology is available already.
It depresses me sometimes how almost everything in society can be be reduced to the question "but how will this generate money"? On the other hand, maybe the sooner people are honest with reality and start asking that question first, the sooner we'd get solutions to problems like this one. At least that seems to be the libertarian take on things. It just concerns me that the end result of the invisible hand given absolute power is something out of a William Gibson nightmare.
The reason we got all this great investigative reporting in the first place was because newspapers were making money.
Journalism needs to have its own source of power besides the government. You can't simultaneously depend on the government for funding and make it your mission to expose the government's shortfalls. Profit provides that power.
Their "independence" doesn't mean that they'll investigate anything/everything. For example, while all of them are willing to quibble about specific aspects of specific govt programs, they're unwilling to go after govt programs in the large (with the small exception of military projects).
True, but is it better for a paper to be afraid of its sponsors and popular opinion than to be afraid of the government? The need to appeal to the lowest common denominator to maximize profit is what's brought us such gems like USAToday and 99% of the garbage on television. On the other hand, some of the only watchable programming IMO is on PBS, and we know where that money comes from.
I don't have the answer; papers funded by the government would be a disaster like you said. But I don't think profit is the panacea to the world's problems.
Money is the expected utilons of human existence. If society doesn't give something money, it doesn't care. If you don't give it money, you don't care either.
Unfortunately, people are often short-sighted when it comes to the use of their money. In earlier days, there were influences of culture and religion that were stronger than economic forces, and provided stability for a civilization. Today, these influences are mostly ignored in favor of money.
If something's not making money or breaking even, then it's losing money. It's taking something good - raw materials, capital, the effort of employees - and producing something less good. It's a drain on society, a parasite.
We produce enough surplus that society can survive a great many parasites (the entire public sector, and all the loss-making businesses) but every little is a brake on potential, particularly the potential for compounding growth. It retards the future.
I did reply, but I realized it was a red herring, and deleted it. It doesn't matter if you like the public sector and I don't. It's parasitic, that's just a fact.
What part of my comment says I like the public sector? While it does seem to be a money burning machine nowadays, it has made unmatched contributions to mankind in the past; that's also just a fact. It thus does not inherently "retard the future".
Personally I'd argue that it got us pay-every-trip-afresh ride to a space we couldn't afford to stay in, and a bomb humanity still cowers beneath, to use your examples. But that would be exactly the red herring I named. When I say it's parasitic, I'm saying it eats and obliterates some part of the value generated by society. It might also generate intangible goods, but they are things society doesn't value economically.
Valid points. I guess I just get hung up on the relationship between things society values economically, and things of intrinsic value to society. Personally I believe the relationship between the two is too loosely coupled to let the market make decisions for us.
The money question is critical. It's how we get food/shelter/consumer electronics to those people who do this task? Money's just* liquefied labor, after all.
Motives are irrelevant. The only important question is whether outcomes are socially beneficial. I assume we evolved to look at motives because they're a good predictor, but today's society is somewhat more complex than the african savannah.
Make the paper a weekly or a monthly. Eliminate fluff, abandon breaking news and provide deep insight.
That's the same model used by magazines like the economist and the atlantic, and I think they're doing well.
This would not be the end of the tabloid, the are so cheap to produce they can go on forever. It would not be the end of local news, it would not even be the end of local daily or breaking news. It would just be the end of of printed daily local news.
I would expect that many cities could support a dozen independent crime/police bloggers, either via ads or direct donations. Smaller municipalities probably wouldn't be able to support any full-timers, but they may only need part-time watching, anyway.
A friend and I had a long discussion about possible models for local investigative journalism online.
The best we could come up with was something along the lines of a modified subscription plan with a low yearly rate (n < $40 usd) funding automated collections of government data with a very small cadre of reporters writing stories and editing each other.
I have often wondered what the impact would be of assigning some journalism students along with a mentor to cover the politics of a small town in gratuitous detail. Scrutinize every action of the city council. Cull through the police reports. Examine who wins and who loses when zoning policies are changed (one of the main bastions of wealth transfer via politics, IMHO). Would citizens care enough to read about this stuff? Would politicians become more accountable?
This seems like it would be a cheap (< $500K) experiment to conduct in a few towns. Perhaps some foundation interested in government transparency could fund it. However, I don't see how it would scale out without a revenue model behind it.
I would make the argument that police are becoming more accountable, not less, as a result of technology (particularly cell-phone video) and common knowledge of FOIA statutes (at least in the US). The cases of the man shot on Seattle transit and the abusive officer in Saint Louis that were both caught on video and punished (and otherwise may not have been) come to mind.
It's probably better that responsibility for tracking cops is more widely disseminated, so that one or two lazy (or corrupt, or ideologically motivated) reporter(s) can't set the tone for an entire city.
On the other hand, it does help to have these things spread by someone seen as neutral, and willing to do some leg-work. Perhaps we need something like a consumerist for police? (I could see this being generalized to local governments too). Or perhaps it will fall into the purview of hyperlocal sites like everyblock. Right now most of these seem to use a highly automated approach, although I imagine they'll evolve into a more user-contributed model.
We need something more than the patchwork "Hope someone catches it on video and it makes youtube's front page" model for accountability than we have now, but I'm not sure that local newspaper reporters are the best solution going forward.
There's been talk for years about getting a standardized accessible electronic format for crime data across the US (John Udell in particular has discussed this at length) but I think we're a long way from any real implementation of that, sadly.
We may not be talking about the same St. Louis officer, but the tape that caught the one I am thinking of was illegal. In many places it is illegal to record video and audio of strangers. It is probably an unintended artifact of old wire tapping laws, but law enforcement agents have been more than happy to exploit it to suppress videos of malfeasance.
The TV stations? If a cop shoots someone in the back I want to watch the video. If a cop beats the crap out of a 15 year old girl I want to watch the video. If a cop knocks a bicycler off his bicycle I want to watch the video.
+ Its not like the newspapers do anything about it, they just report it. Its the redditors and 4channers and youtubers who go on a crusade to hold these guys accountable
Redditors getting outraged because of a video showing police brutality is great. But it doesn't scale to cover things like fact-checking the police, like the article is talking about. If there isn't a shocking video, TV news and Reddit won't really care.
Consider the article's example of Baltimore. How often is there a reddit, 4chan, or youtube outrage relating to Baltimore? Whereas the Baltimore Sun can have crime reporters there every day.
That's true to an extent but.... (I apologise for the terminology)
There are already great examples of 'new media,' amateurs supported by new technologies & online communities doing things that would not have gotten done under a 100% old media regime. Exposing police brutality, war crimes, or other issues we associate with heavy duty press. That is, there are circumstances that involve more then a flood of commentary where new media does a better job then old media.
On the other hand, New Media is not going to fill all the wholes old media leaves behind. I think that's clear already.
But we don't really know what, how deep or how many these holes are going to be. Currently, reddit/youtube supplement exixsting media because existing media exists. If we take professional media out of the equation, it will evolve differently.
There might not be that much of a long term net loss from newspapers going out of business. There are some shocking videos going to be produced outside of conventional media. It's still not clear how many or what quality.
And look at how great the Baltimore Sun has made Baltimore.
My point: the idea that the old order has to be preserved because the new order is not up to the task carries a lot more water if the old order is functioning effectively.
Why is this comment being voted down? Just because it contains the word "4chan"? The notion that the lowly and despised 4chan is actually holding the Government accountable is a perfectly fair point.
I just voted it down myself but I'm sure it will be voted up again.
The unexamined fallacy that I saw in the post was the idea that TV stations engage in hard hitting news at the level of the local newspaper reporting. Internet outlets can publicize local stories if the original stories exist. The original article's point remains: without newspaper digging there would be no local story, especially no credible local story.
The problem would be worst in smaller cities like Baltimore.
Those incidents usually don't get reported. In a situation where its your word against a cop's, the cop is always given preference. I can honestly say that I don't think I can remember reading a single "bad cop" story that didn't have video evidence
It's only one story, but it includes lots of bad cops. One newspaper reporter. And no video.
Yes, there was an overheard conversation on the police radio. But that was 'hearsay' evidence. Not something that was copied (at least to my knowledge).
Edit: NO, it doesn't qualify. The conversation was recorded. Thanks for making the point.
Doesn't the author refute his own point when towards the end of the article he admits that it has become very rare for reporters to actually research those things? Also, he only provides anecdotal evidence when he says "no blogger was trying to cover this". There are probably countless other offenses that no newspaper reporters are trying to cover, either.
I wonder if newspapers and other media overestimate their power? They would like to think that they can sway public opinion, but maybe ultimately they are simply forced to write scandalous stories, but they can not manufacture them. Like they can make a lot of money out of "Britney Spears cut her hair", but maybe if they tried to make a big fuzz about that police incident, nobody would care and nobody would buy the newspaper anyway.
He's making the point that newspapers don't do this anymore, either, and that there's very little chance of newspapers starting to do things any better, which is a problem.
Press is show. Single anecdotal cases make headlines. What doesn't make a headline doesn't get reported. "Crime is down everywhere" doesn't sell. Some "news" like fear mongering with terrorism or a cute lost child get full.
Really? I can think of numerous cases where the press uncovered corruption. Investigative reporting is extremely important - and there is no alternative to that.
> I can think of numerous cases where the press uncovered corruption.
And I can think of numerous cases where the press "uncovered corruption" that wasn't. I can think of cases where the press helped with/caused corruption.
I have not heard of a case where the press was involved in corruption - honestly. And even if they were corrupt, they were corrupt with private money.
Even in cases where the press "got it wrong" the harm of public interest was not that great. Maybe in the USA there are not a lot of corruption - but in my country it is rife.
Politicians wants to push everything under the carpet and the police system is wilfully incompetent (since it falls under the minister of safety and security, another politician).
The reality is that there are a few publications that do excellent work. Here are a few things in which the press paid a significant part in bringing to light: corruption in a massive arms deal (and by the next president), dealings of a mining magnate (who eventually was murdered), showing corruption by the national police commissioner, shedding light on numerous large fraudulent financial schemes, etc...
The list can go on. I doubt a blogger will be able to take on complex and multi-faceted corruption cases while he is being sued from all sides.
Try that line with an actual journalist. There is corruption everywhere, even in the newsrooms. And politicians don't always want to hide things.
A few years ago it came out that Deep Throat was Mark Felt -- he had been #3 at the FBI. Felt was disgruntled that Nixon had passed him over for promotion after JE Hoover died, and so carried out a leak campaign through the Washington Post that ultimately brought Nixon down.
The Post editors and Woodward & Berstein knew who Felt was. They chose to keep quiet and accept decades of hero-worship. The truth was that they were willing participants in a rather slimy and petty act of political revenge.
"There is corruption everywhere, even in the newsrooms."
So? What is to prevent a rival paper from reporting on the newsroom? (I actually have memory of this happening - an editor of a major newspaper was a philander and another paper ran an article on him. Another big story happened 20 odd years ago - one paper was funded by the government and another newspaper brought that to light - the result was that one of the people who organised funding did not become president).
"And politicians don't always want to hide things."
So, if they are not hiding something they would not mind people looking? I am one of those people who think it is a good idea of a healthy dose of cynicism for public officials.
"They chose to keep quiet and accept decades of hero-worship. The truth was that they were willing participants in a rather slimy and petty act of political revenge."
The question is not if Woodward&Bernstein were upstanding citizens with good values. The question is this: Was the Watergate affair good for the country? Would it be better if it had not been brought to light?
> The question is not if Woodward&Bernstein were upstanding citizens with good values. The question is this: Was the Watergate affair good for the country? Would it be better if it had not been brought to light?
"Don't say anything" isn't the only alternative to "tell only part of the story".
Woodward and Bernstein deliberately withheld relevant information to make themselves and their source look good. If anyone else does that, the press screams "coverup", "corruption", etc.
> The question is not if Woodward&Bernstein were upstanding citizens with good values. The question is this: Was the Watergate affair good for the country? Would it be better if it had not been brought to light?
I'm always amused by the assumption that Watergate was a relatively big deal. Yes, taking down a president was a major accomplishment, but I'm talking about the underlying crime and coverup.
Does anyone seriously believe that far worse things don't happen fairly regularly?
I'd argue that Watergate actually argues that the press is relatively useless.
You went from "I have not heard of a case ..." to mentioning a few cases. I took your first comment at face value; now I don't know what to make of it.
Philandering around the workplace is usually a big no-no but it is definitely not corruption by any stretch of the imagination. I did this to show you that journalists will easily turn on their own kind.
As for the case of the government covertly starting a newspaper, I have not heard about it (but read about it in history books). They did this with the express purpose to change public opinion - since the current English newspapers were too critical of the government (with good reason). That really is before my time (20+ years or more).
I do not recall a single instance in my country where journalists were found guilty of corruption. Yet for politicians the list of the non-corrupt would probably be shorter.
Actually, yes. Nixon was a son-of-a-bitch, but that doesn't mean B & W didn't violate the public trust. For several months in the 1970's, a virtually unknown spook paralyzed the government of the most powerful nation on earth. And Woodward & Bernstein covered it up.
Refusing to name sources is about two things: actually protecting people in danger, and protecting your rep as a journalist. Felt's safety was never an issue. This is a man capable of bringing down the president, right? He was sitting on 50 years of dirty secrets collected by JE Hoover. No one dared touch him.
So B, W, and their editor kept quiet for purely selfish reasons. Then they willingly let themselves and their paper be used to settle a personal score against Nixon. They provided Felt with cover to make his leaks more effective. All the while they painted it as a home run for integrity and democracy, when in fact it was a political feud.
How is all of that not that a violation of the public trust, ie, corruption?
> I have not heard of a case where the press was involved in corruption - honestly. And even if they were corrupt, they were corrupt with private money.
It's actually fairly commonplace for "the press" to be involved in public corruption. They'll even defend the corruption.
> I doubt a blogger will be able to take on complex and multi-faceted corruption cases while he is being sued from all sides.
And how many press organizations will do that?
More important, that's irrelevant because corruption investigations rarely involve lawsuits.
> It's actually fairly commonplace for "the press" to be involved in public corruption. They'll even defend the corruption.
Can you give some examples?
> And how many press organizations will do that?
Not all papers - but some do. In my country there are 2 good English newspapers and one magazine that does excellent investigative reporting.
> More important, that's irrelevant because corruption investigations rarely involve lawsuits.
Corruption cases are full of lawsuits! My favourite investigative magazine (http://www.noseweek.co.za/) was closed for almost a year because the person running it was sued for libel. He won that lawsuit - but he had to stop publishing that year while defending himself in court.
In 2007 he was sued by a bank to prevent him from naming a list of clients that the bank helped with tax evasion - he won again and published the list of names.
>> More important, that's irrelevant because corruption investigations rarely involve lawsuits.
> Corruption cases are full of lawsuits!
We're both assuming that our home turf is universal.
Libel suits in the US are extremely rare. Libel lawsuits involving public figures are a small minority because they're almost impossible to win. If the accused libeler can argue "I'm part of the press", it's even worse.
As a result, libel lawsuits aren't a factor in corruption investigations in the US.
> Could we please have some examples? I can recall many cases where the press has made mistakes, but none where they were actively corrupt.
What definition of "actively corrupt" are we using? Is it enough for them to get paid off in return for looking the other way/not reporting, or do they have to actually steal something? Does it matter who pays them and what the connection is between the source of the money and the evil-doer.
Note that "the press" is often a cheap date. They'll go out of their way to avoid writing bad things about folks/programs/issues that they like. They'll trade access for non-coverage.
For example, CNN admits that they didn't report things that Saddam Hussein didn't want known in return for being able to report from pre-war Iraq. That let them make money, money that didn't come from SH. Do you count it as corruption? (I don't, but many folks who get excited about corruption do.)
Both of you, kindly include atleast one or 2 examples to make your respective cases. I can think of Enron, Nixon which were uncovered by the press. But where did press uncover something that wasn't? How does that work ..
video and pictures from mobile phones spread by bloggers.
Not a day goes by on Reddit without a video of someone being beaten by the police in the street, and thousands of bloggers pick it up instantly.
If I were a corrupt officer I would fear a horde of a thousand angry bloggers with video as proof more than a single journalist that has the home number of a local judge.
Online news can be localized. Forums like these can be easily retrofitted for the hyper local and give people lots of things relevant to their area, rather than having to sift through the trash of news to find the morsels you want.
I think the best model at the moment for funding journalism is to allow people to contribute part of their tax contribution to a news organisation of their choice. Then the only cost you would incur is the effort of filling in a form. The news organisations become responsible to the population instead of advertisers whilst some sort of market forces remain. Effectively you'd be saying to anyone who contributes taxes "here's $100 dollars, which news organisation do you want to support".
Effective journalism is important to a democracy and it should be funded in as democratic manner as possible.
the police only "need to be watched" because the police have no incentive structure to serve the people. their paycheck does not rely on how well they serve your community. It relies on how well they comply with federal regulators.
Correlation/Causation problem: The police are getting away with these policies not because journalists aren't there to watch them, but because ordinary citizens no longer give a damn.
The newspapers are desperate for a reason to exist.
For fuck's sake, the Huffington Post asked a question at President Obama's first presser. There will always be a vigorous press in this country - it's just a matter if the legacy media wants to get their act together enough to be a part of that in the future.
At the very, very least, new organizations free of legacy costs will step up. In Chicago, the Chi-Town Daily News (http://www.chitowndailynews.org/) is one of them. They've got a bunch of citizen journalists, supplemented by a handful of paid staff.
Journalists are called to the vocation the same way that artists, musicians, priests, and others are called to theirs.
Obama's press conference is national news. This article is arguing about the lack of local coverage.
The Huffington Post doesn't have the desire nor ability to chase up on some local police shooting, unless it really, really stands out as a potentially big, national story.
A local daily newspaper, with a staff of investigative journalists some of whom are dedicated to watching the police, does. None (or almost none) of those stories will make national headlines (and so they're not suitable for national papers), but they most certainly make a huge difference to local life.
Personally, I don't think the solution is to have newspapers watching the police. I think the solution is that all police officers at work should be permanently under watch via a justin.tv kind of system. Maybe with one day of delay (to prevent "the bad guys" from being able to tell that the police are on their way to their place), but no more. And this should most likely be administered by a third party with the power to have police officers docked if they refuse to hand over full recordings (so probably by a sub-department of the DoJ).
No, it's about recognizing that online-only organizations are worthy parts of the reporting infrastructure. Some day - and hopefully soon - Mayor Daley will call upon a reporter from the Chi-Town Daily News.
The HuffPo is fascinating - they provide an outlet for 9/11 truthers and their own paid reporters on the same platform. And the President of the United States recognizes such a brand as worthy of engagement. People run for local school boards for a reason - don't underestimate local citizen journalism just yet.
And cops already have cameras in their squad cars; many cities are already awash in CCTVs.
But there's something that David Simon says that's really interesting - he's fighting for a document. A paper document. That's the sort of stuff that EveryBlock and Public.Resource.org are fighting to free. And Carl's trying to get the GPO job: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498610
I dispute your notion that people are "called" to vocations. It's not that easy, never that easy. People may move in some directions more quickly than other people, but that doesn't make it some sort of preternatural thing. David Lynch is regarded as possibly the foremost filmmaker of this generation, but he started off as an artist, and he still paints in his free time, and in the meantime he's recorded music and written stories. So is "painter" his calling? Or is it "director", even though that's not what he's most interested in?
I'm biased reading any David Simon article because I use the context of The Wire as sort of an opening to Simon's points in any article. One of the big themes of The Wire was how people don't easily care about things immediately outside of their own frame of reference. That means that cops don't care about anything beyond cophood, politicians only care about relevant political issues, and so on.
The Huffington Post doesn't care about local news. They don't care about issues in Baltimore specifically. They care about big generic things, and as such they miss the point more often than not. They're a pretty poor source even for online reporting. Even the best ones, though, don't focus superlocally like actually local papers do.
Simon's argument isn't that newspapers are wonderful and magical, though. His argument is that newspapers also failed us, after they started chasing sensationalism and yellow journalism. His second point, made here, is that too few bloggers care about things like this. A local blogger doesn't have the instant influence that a journalist for a paper does. As a result, the local stuff gets even more ignored, beyond the basic cheap local news that everybody knows and nobody cares about. That's a major problem, and it's not one that's easily fixed.
Hardly, noone knows of Alex Jones except for his small group of followers on the internet, and since he is known for exaggerating the crap out of things, noone else takes him seriously...so he can report that a cop executed a 5 year old girl, and people would need video proof before they believe him
Read the article. I don't see bloggers and twitterati having the same social impact as a crime beat reporter with a circuit court judge's card in his wallet. All you're going to get from that is photos, opinion, and a lot of waving and yelling. Stuff like "secret police videos". I don't see much crime analysis, deep reporting, and investigative news from those formats. I might be wrong, though. Does anybody know of serious in-depth crime reporting that's come from blogs? (I'm not even going to use "in-depth" and "twitter" in the same breath)
I don't see much crime analysis, deep reporting, and investigative news from those formats.
I don't see much from newspapers, either. That's the point of this article: The guy is telling us that newspapers are already dead, and the problem is visible right now.
I don't see any reason at all why a blogger couldn't be just as effective as a crime reporter. Except for one: They need to have enough money to survive. We're going to have to work that out somehow. But I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter turns out to be a part of the solution. People use the tools they have.
Of course, even if we work as hard as we can, the future won't be perfect. But neither was the past. Despite the best efforts of folks like the author of this article, police brutality and corruption weren't exactly unheard of even in the newspaper-reporting heyday of the 1940s and 1950s.
You can certainly make the argument that newspapers were never that good at these things to begin with, or that this type of coverage is mostly gone, but the fact remains that as a side-effect of paid content you end up with somebody covering local stories -- and local stories usually means crime. Having one person becoming an in-house expert on how to gather crime information, collecting informants, knowing how to work the paperwork, making friends with people in the court system, having a large organization with lawyers backing them up -- I don't see that emerging just from technology.
That's no reason to fear the future. We'll figure it out, I'm sure. But it's (to me) a little Pollyannish to assume that because the new media formats are easier to use and disseminate information rapidly, it's all somehow automatically better than older media. Stuff changes, and as you point, out we've got some things to work out.
I'd suggest that things like the Innocence Project actually are in-depth crime reporting, but with a point of view and with a purpose. And with tools like EveryBlock, citizens are going to be able to have access to CompStat-like data. We're going to have a more informed and empowerd police reporting.
To some extent, investigative reporting is necessary because we don't have video of all the events. As video recording becomes more and more pervasive, it will become less and less likely that a crime or the immediate surroundings were not caught on record. Of course, criminals will go out of their way to avoid recording (as according to the author's fictional crime series, The Wire, they avoid cellphones), but only criminals and privacy weirdos will do that, and there are a lot more criminals than privacy advocates.
Of course, some investigations will still be needed, but even if there are currently no investigative reporters who blog as their primary outlet, other types of reporting has successfully made the jump. I couldn't find him in google just now, but there was a blogger from several years ago who was embedded in Iraq and made his living off of his blog and occasional freelance stories sold to other outlets (newspapers? Dunno).
One objection to this might be that governments will just legislate against cameras recording their workings, which they're already trying, but in the long run, as cameras and other recording devices get smaller and become more integral to everyone's life, this will have no more effect than Canute's courtiers' plans to roll back the tide.
Then we'll wait. Give it 20 to 30 years and the blogger generation will become the circuit court judges. Then the problem will be solved. Many of the generational disconnects which make bloggers less capable than old-media journalists can be resolved given time.
Talking Points Memo has done some good in-depth reporting. For example they helped expose a lot of the scandal around U.S. attorneys being fired. I think they also started the scandal around Trent Lott at Strom Thurmond's birthday party.
I guess this is not "crime reporting" in the Baltimore Sun sense. A lot more bloggers will go after national news, since it's more common for blogs to have a national audience. Blogging just isn't organized around the city level like journalism is.
Blogging just isn't organized around the city level like journalism is.
This sentence is probably true at the moment. Yet it still amuses me greatly. It's like living in 1910 and reading an article about the automobile. ("They're great toys for rich people, but they just don't have the same rich infrastructure that the horse and buggy does.")
The word weblog is not yet twelve years old. The short form, blog, will celebrate its tenth birthday in a couple of months. This technology is a baby. And on the local scene bloggers compete for audience with newspapers, radio, and TV, which have had a headstart of between fifty and four hundred years, and which even now command large budgets, large staffs, and a lot of very flashy advertising.
I hope you're right! I would love to read interesting blogs about San Francisco (where I live) and it sure seems like if it would happen anywhere, it would happen here. So far I haven't found any SF-focused blogs that I want to read.
The short of it - unless the paper cuts expenses by somewhere in the range of 50%, Hearst will will sell it. And in this economic climate, that's code for close it; see the Rocky Mountain News (http://www.vimeo.com/3390739) or the Tucson Citizen.
IF the SF Chronicle goes under - making San Francisco the first major metro market without a daily paper - I have no doubt that the displaced journalists and strong startup culture of the area will forge the first steps to a true, information era watch dog journalism.
In short, newspapers need to stop pretending they still cover the news so that the next generation can figure out how to make this work.
And no, citizen journalists and the twitterati are not the answer. Great journalism can only exist when it can support the salary of a great journalist. Otherwise, that journalist WILL go work as a spin doctor for whatever private firm or state government will pay them. I've seen it happen many many times. How can an unpaid citizen journalist match wits with that?
My startup, The Windy Citizen is a social news site for Chicago. When Citizen journalists post something to their blogs, they submit it to the Windy Citizen and Chicagoans can vote it up and check it out. We're sending 50-100 readers to the sites that crack the front page right now...and those stories are then showing up in the local papers since reporters and editors are reading us.
3 years from now there will be hundreds of local blogs in every U.S. city. We need "interesting-ness" filters for this stuff just like we need filters for tech blogs and political blogs right now.
If there's anyone out there interested in chipping in some tech expertise to help out (I'm a journalist and am bootstrapping this) I'm all ears.
What do you think all those newspaper reporters are going to do after the newspapers are gone? Move online and continue what they have always done without the inconvenience of an editor telling them what to look in to (or not).
Death of newspapers != Death of investigative reporting
I have always found this curious: In general, criminals cause significantly more damage than police. Then where is the outcry against politicians who are soft on crime and thus allow these increased rates of crime?
Thats what I am really worried about. That without good newspapers, politicians who allow an increase in crime through their policies will go unaccountable. (Whether that is already a problem is a matter of much debate).
As a teenager, I was always shocked at how rude police were to me; they seemed to have no respect for the laws they were supposedly there to enforce. However, as a 30-something, even when getting a speeding ticket, the police are generally polite. Have the police changed, or have they started treating me as someone who might have some power to keep them in check?