I have the pleasure of teaching at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU, in both the graduate and Continuing Education programs. Every month, the MS in Global Affairs folks have a discussion (followed by a lunch) and this past Friday the topic was “New Directions in News Reporting.” Veteran reporter and professor of journalism, Barbara Borst, moderated an ace panel consisting of John Daniszewski, international editor for the AP; Stephen Engelberg, managing editor for ProPublica; and David Case, an editor with GlobalPost. There was a ton of journalism experience up on that dais.
One of the principal themes of the discussion seemed to be that with the tremendous economic pressures that newspapers and magazines have been experiencing in the past several years, these businesses have had to do a lot of adapting, including downsizing. (Fact: The advent of craigslist took most of the air out of the sails of classified advertising at newspapers. That slaughtered their bottom lines.) The economics are the bad news.
The good news is that there has been a burgeoning of reporting on the internet that has taken different forms, has greatly expanded the ability of both readers and journalists to access information, and has provided a new creative outlet for “citizen journalists,” bloggers and activists who have important news to disseminate. Venerable organizations like the AP, founded in 1846, and brand new sources such as ProPublica and GlobalPost, are charging ahead with vital journalistic services. (Michael Massing, one of my favorite writers, had a great series last year in the “NY Review of Books” on these “new horizons.”)
Steve Engelberg mentioned one new approach: “distributed reporting.” ProPublica has a Reporting Network that organizes readers and helps them “commit acts of journalism.” They also call this “crowdsourcing” or “collaborative reporting.” See what they’re doing with this and if you want to be involved. They have 4,000 stringers now all over the world.
There was also discussion having to do with search engine optimization (SEO) and the use of social media. (I will be the first to admit that I have been woefully blithely unaware of social media’s value. I just write what I write and hope for the best: that you will read what’s here, keep coming back and pass along what you think is worthwhile for others to see.)
It’s certainly abundantly clear at this point that we’re in a brave new world in which the intersection of traditional journalism, including investigative reporting, with the blogosphere and, in the case of climate change and sustainability, also with science, politics, policy and activism, is producing a fertile and useful universe of information and discourse.
