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
