Will cost cuts imperil journalism?
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post wrote recently about the cost cuts at newspapers like the Los Angeles Times — where the editor was recently fired for not agreeing to cut staff — and how this could impact investigative journalism. He describes a 2004 investigation in which three L.A. Times reporters revealed how a U.S. congressman was helping several Russian firms that were funneling money to his daughter’s lobbying firm. Then he says:
Real investigative reporting, as opposed to the what-happened-yesterday stuff, is time-consuming, risky and expensive. And as one news organization after another sheds staff in this tough financial climate, it’s worth considering what aggressive journalism has produced lately.
As Kurtz notes, there has been a wave of cutbacks at major newspapers, including a 19-per-cent cut at the Dallas Morning News, 17 per cent at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, more cuts at the Philadelphia Inquirer despite a cut of 15 per cent last year, an 8-per-cent cut at the Washington Post, and so on. All of which, as he put it, “means fewer bodies to pore over records at City Hall, the statehouse or federal agencies.” Will we pay for these cutbacks later?
Meanwhile, media consultant Juan Antonio Giner asks whether it’s really cuts that are the problem or the way that newspapers are allocating the resources they have. As he puts its:
Of course that you need journalists, but for what? To re-package the same news from the same sources? To attend the same boring press conferences? To publish today the same news that our readers knew YESTERDAY? To produce pages and pages of commodity information with no value added? To edit pages and pages of listings that could go directly to our web site? To attend long and badly planned news meetings?
Who is right? Jeff Jarvis (in a post called — in typical Jarvis fashion — “Killing the crap to save the news”) agrees with Giner that it’s about allocation rather than raw numbers, and Roy Greenslade of the Guardian says that British papers get by on much smaller numbers of reporters, thank you very much. And Jack Shafer at Slate magazine notes that journalists love to talk about the services they provide to society whenever the word cutbacks gets mentioned.
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