I agree with you that good journalism should be done via resarch at source and not directed by any advertisers, be that the private commercial sector or the government, but isn’t that a very romantic view? I presume that the cost of newspapers if truly independent would be higher and the readership potentially smaller unless the format of newspaper is altered to be even more interactive and present online. There is however an inherent problem in interactivity as well as bloggers could lead off to less relevant tangents than those the journalists bring across. So I think you have interesting thoughts but the conundrum is how to escape the productivity versus viability issues which influence most independent views. I work in the arts, we have the same issue there, especially during the crash. There are plenty of interesting ideas out there but they do need to be viable and sustainable to carry any level of force.
I read John Hersey’s Hiroshima cover to cover tonight. It perfectly exemplifies what good journalism should be: a total immersion in the subject, full of detail, and presenting facts as necessary ingrediants of the main story, not sprinkled on top as a forced seasoning like so many writers mistakingly do.
This century needs this kind of writing just as much as the previous one did; but Hersey wrote about Hiroshima by going to Hiroshima, not by reading about it on Wikipedia. Without the funds to travel, to spend weeks or months absorbed in a single topic, rather than quickly churning out story after story in an increasingly hopeless attempt to raise advertising revenue, journalists will adjust to these ever-lower standards, and quality will be the first victim.
And maybe the next time a bomb is dropped, the world may twitter about it, but will anyone actually take the time to examine just how and why it happened?
