"The Reconstruction of American Journalism" is a 100-page report on the state of journalism in the United States. Written by Leonard Downie, the VP of The Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, a professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, it describes changes in the news media industry (i.e. the 'happening' of the internet) and its ultimately detrimental effect on traditional media news outlets, of course newspapers especially. Here we will briefly summarize some points, and there is a lot of material in the report that merits an in-depth read of the whole thing.

The report is quite detailed, and includes various examples and covers many topics, but focuses on local news and the value of quality journalism. Beginning with a history of the newspaper industry that culminates in its weakness in the face of internet news, Downie and Schudson explain the importance of investigative and accountability journalism for a democracy, holding it as a public good.

The internet, they say, has put under threat "independent reporting that provides information, investigation, analysis, and community knowledge, particularly in the coverage of local affairs" which has been traditionally the domain of newspaper reporting. Now with all the recent budget cuts papers have had to decrease support for investigative reporting, perhaps their most important role in society.

While the internet does provide massive amounts of information, information itself is not what is essentially of value; what is important is the use to which it is put. The internet may be wonderful for its vast sea of data but it is not so wonderful for the accompanying fleet of opinionated 'commenators,' usually uninformed or with an agenda to manipulate or present only part of the relevant information. Certainly, "if news organizations were to vanish en masse, information, investigation, analysis, and community knowledge would not disappear. But something else would be lost, and we would be reminded that there is a need not just for information, but for news judgment oriented to a public agenda and a general audience," what we can reasonably understand as reporting for the public good.

However it is not just new technologies and medias that have hurt newspapers, according to Downie and Schudson, but also the for-profit corporate environment than many papers operate in. Large profit margins and shareholder benefits concerned newspaper owners more than quality reporting: "quarterly earnings increasingly became the preoccupation of some large newspaper chain owners and managers who were far removed from their companies' newsrooms and the communities they covered. To maintain earnings whenever advertising revenues fell, as they did during a recession, some owners began to cut costs aggressively. They started to reverse some of their previous increases in reporting staffs and the space devoted to news." When the internet began competing in earnest with traditional news sources, it found many of them already reporting markedly less news than they used to.

As the focus of the report is on 'independent news reporting' rather than newspapers, alternative sources of investigative and accountability journalism are examined. Nonprofits like Propublica, university publications and high-profile bloggers and 'citizen journalists,' among others, are detailed and held out as a hope for continued journalistic quality, and advice is given on how small news orgs can thrive. However the newspaper's dominance in the field is not understated, and is linked extensively with the role of government in protecting journalism.

In terms of federal support, the writers "are not recommending a government bailout of newspapers, nor any of the various direct subsidies that governments give newspapers in many European countries, although those subsidies have not had a noticeably chilling effect on newspapers' willingness to print criticism of those governments...Most Americans have a deep distrust of direct government involvement or political influence in independent news reporting, a sentiment we share. But this should not preclude government support for news reporting any more than it has for the arts, the humanities, and sciences, all of which receive some government support."

This is the thrust of their argument for federal funding; basically, because the government contributes to other public goods (arts/humanities, science, health) it should set up a 'National Fund for Local News' or something equivalent that supports the public good of investigative journalism and news creation.

At the end of the report comes the important stuff, the recommendations, "intended to support independent, original, and credible news reporting, especially local and accountability reporting, across all media in communities throughout the United States. Rather than depending primarily on newspapers and their now waning concentration of reporting resources, each sizable American community should have a number of diverse sources of news reporting" such as commercial, nonprofit and private citizen news organizations.

1) The government should make it easier for news organizations to become low-profit or nonprofit corporations, and the legality surrounding these designations must be made clearer. There is considerable discussion of the nonprofit model in the report, and the authors' predilection towards it is made obvious.

2) Philanthropists and funding foundations must step it up and give more money, focusing on continuing news and journalism projects rather than one-time affairs.

3) The Corporation for Public Broadcasting should be reoriented to provide local news for the communities served by public stations, and should receive an expanded budget and powers.

4) Universities must become sources of funding and actual news at a variety of levels. Digital journalism laboratories could be set up to foster innovation and budding new reporters.

5) The government, the FCC in particular, should take fees collected from telecom companies and users to create a Fund for Local News, an equivalent to the National Endowment for the Arts but for journalism.

6) Public information should be made more accessible and available to the general public. Federal, state, and local governments produce an enormous amount of data, which should be open to everyone's eyes.

The general message is summed up thus: "The challenge is to turn the current moment of transformation into a reconstruction of American journalism, enabling independent reporting to emerge enlivened and enlarged from the decline of long-dominant news media. It may not be essential to save or promote any particular news medium, including printed newspapers. What is paramount is preserving independent, original, credible reporting, whether or not it is popular or profitable, and regardless of the medium in which it appears."

Although this report is fairly exhaustive, well researched and well intended, it neglects some important issues the media industry faces. Any in-depth discussion of advertising, paid content schemes (subscriptions, micropayments, paywalls) and for-profit business models is noticeably lacking in favor of the nonprofit approach. Furthermore the recommendations presented are not really that new or innovative; ideas like these have been circulating for a while. However this makes sense given the journalism-rather-than-newspaper focus of the report.

Further commentary can be found at Mutter's Reflections of a Newsosaur and Nieman Journalism Labs.

Source: Journalism School of Columbia University