Iraq Makes For Costly Coverage

Columbia Journalism Review has a pretty good editorial in the Nov./Dec. issue about how news organizations are learning to boost news coverage and reduce costs. I had never given much thought to how much it takes to staff a news bureau in Iraq, but according to CJR, it’s a lot. In discussing this lengthy package in the New York Times, CJR says:

According to their editor, the writers, Damien Cave and Stephen Farrell, spent more than half of their time for nearly two months on the piece, including a number of days as embeds. Their research was supplemented by the work of twenty-nine other reporters, photographers, videographers, editors, and members of the graphics staff. The foreign editor, Susan Chira, devoted roughly the equivalent of two weeks to the story. Just to maintain a bureau in Iraq these days, between life insurance and blast walls, guards and transportation, guns and generators, takes more than $3 million annually at the Times—plus staff salaries.

This, to me, hits on what I see as the major issue that confronts journalists in our time: How do you make journalism work when budgets are tight? No one knows what the best answer is yet, but the editorial talks about a few other efforts that are interesting.

• ABC News is setting up one-person “micro-bureaus” in places like Rio, Dubai and Jakarta, where reporter-producers will tape and edit their own packages.
• ProPublica, which is something like a nonprofit investigative journalism wire service
• MinnPost, another nonprofit daily news Web site based in Minnesota.

Speaking of things I would like to see in journalism: Why hasn’t anyone taken the muckety approach to covering local news? I think this site is just the neatest idea in Web news I have seen. I think back to all of the boards of selectmen, small towns and insider deals I wrote about, yet had no great way to showcase. The muckety tool would be perfect for it. I am surprised no one else has tried something similar.

Here’s one that takes a look at the connections to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Hammering At The Source

Perhaps it’s because I get so much resistance in the day-to-day course of being a reporter that I really enjoy it when a smart journalist takes a subtle whack at a person or company that has thwarted him. Hiawatha Bray has a good example of it in the Globe today. The victim? The one laptop per child program, which apparently refused to cooperate with Bray in a simple comparison with other cheap laptops. Bray handled it pretty well, I think.

(A)re they any good? We figured the best way to find out was with a three-way hands-on showdown. The foundation refused to participate, saying it didn’t have any spare units to lend. It also refused to let us visit the headquarters and run tests.

Too bad. It could have been a contender.

It’s a good, mild potshot at the inanity of public relations methods of groups like the laptop folks. The program goes out of its way to post wikis, send press releases, talk about ethics and “vision”, etc. But when an outsider tries to independently evaluate it? Forget it; they’re not interested.

If the laptop program ever gets off the ground, what will happen down the road when some pesky reporter inevitably starts to dig into whether it was a success? Odds point to resistance, not openness. Some vision that would make…

The Bonds That Tries My Patience

I just finished watching an ESPN broadcast where Peter Gammons, Tim Kurkjian, and several other sportswriters debated whether slugger Barry Bonds deserves to make it into the Baseball Hall of Fame. And I realized what makes me uncomfortable with the Barry Bonds situation: The fact that journalists can actually decide the answer to that question.

Baseball writers are the ones who cast ballots for the hall of fame. This fact baffles me. These are the people who are assigned to cover baseball as a professional reporters; a profession with hallmarks of objectivity, distance and contemplation.

None of those hallmarks is action. In the case of sportswriters, that action is voting.

Many journalists, myself included, do not vote in elections, participate in political activities, march, protest, work on behalf of a partisan group or generally do anything that conveys the impression they maintain a bias.

The sheer fact that journalists vote for the hall of fame puts them in a position inherently at odds with the profession they are paid to do: namely, remain objective observers, above the fray.

Perhaps this point stuck out to me because I was flipping back and forth between C-SPAN and Sportscenter. But the logical similarity is crystal clear in my mind. The difference between a politician and journalist at its core is this: Politicians use argument to justify their actions. Journalists’ arguments by design have no more bite than the insights they carry.

Gammons and crew — discussing why they may vote for Bonds — struck me as grandstanding. Why? They are the actual decision makers, not mere influencers. A journalist should make an argument based on its own merits, not to justify a conclusion.

That’s not to say the writers were wrong to argue about it. The problem is their arguments have real teeth — in this case voting to decide on whether Bonds is admitted to the hall of fame. It’s something wholly unjournalistic.

How can a reporter critique something unobjectively when it’s his own opinion he tries to influence? This is far more akin to propaganda than reporting.

If I ever become a sportswriter, count me out on voting. But I will definitely argue until I am blue in the face.