The New Face of Investigative Journalism
As we all know, print media is dieing the hard death. There’s this vicious cycle: dropping circulation means dropping revenues, dropping revenues means staff cuts, staff cuts mean less fresh material and more editorial slips, those mean less interest, which drops circulation, and so it continues. This isn’t the only problem. Competition from TV news has been eating away at circulation for decades, and now the internet is accelerating that, with its wonderfully wide distribution and rebranding of wire-service propaganda drivel and that pinko – libertarian statist capitalist commie godsend, the blogosphere.
But what came to mind earlier today—thanks to this lies.com link (courtesy of blunt object)—is that print media, even with most of it on the verge of collapse, is probably the last actual home of investigative journalism.
Think about it: in a newspaper, a story can be 300-500 words, easily. If it’s a big deal, it could break 1000. That’s room to present a few things in some reasonable detail. Print magazines can go even further. For example, Rolling Stone recently did a detailed article about AIG and the wall street collapse. It’s a really good one, and it’s long. Some research and digging went into this. Matt Taibbi had more access to the relevant information than your standard blogosphere hack. He was also paid to do his research, which is something else that most bloggers don’t have going for them.
On the other hand, TV news and the blogosphere both suffer from an alarming flood of populism, because they have tremendous flexibility in their structure and what they cover in response to what’s popular. Newspapers would secretly love to be in the same boat, because it’s great for advertising revenue. But it has a price. Check out the face of the new media:
Top WordPress.com blogs today
- CNN Political Ticker
- FAIL Blog: Pictures and Videos of Owned, Pwnd and Fail Moments
- Celebrity Baby Blog – People.com
- PEOPLE TV Watch
So we have a condensed version of a TV news network that uses almost exclusively wire-service material and sucks even more when it doesn’t, and then we have embarrassing pictures, babies and celebrities.
And hey, this publication already exists.
