The Next Newsroom Project

A few years ago, the Washington Post embraced the strategy of having separate digital and print newsrooms. But in recent years, it has gradually merged them back to together.

The impact of that decision was noted this week after the Post published a two-year investigation called “Top Secret America.” The series examines the enormous growth of secretive American agencies since Sept. 11.

This weekend, On The Media host Brooke Gladstone interviewed one of the journalists involved, William M. Arkin.

At one point, after discussing the newsroom merger, Gladstone asked: “Do you think it would have been possible to assemble and present this volume of data before these online tools were available?”

Arkin replied:

“You know, it couldn’t have been done without the digital side. And in the time period that The Washington Post supported this two-year project, Brooke, they consolidated the digital and print newsrooms.

So now all of the people who work at The Washington Post, both online and on paper, work in the same building, on the same newsroom, in the same floor. And I think that this is the product of what that consolidation has meant, and I think it’s a pointer of what’s possible when one conceives of a project digitally from the beginning.”

You can listen to the segment here:

Of course, the answer is no, far from it. But last week, On The Media devoted its entire show to examining different aspects related to the future of newspapers. Much of this represented well covered ground, so for those of you involved in this discussion for a long time, there may not be much new here.

However, there were a couple of interesting segments that I’d recommend. The first is Google’s Quest To Save Newspapers, an interview with The Atlantic’s James Fallows. He points to two reasons Google is trying to help newspapers:

“A low-road reason, which they admit but don’t stress, and a high-road reason. The low-road reason is something Eric Schmidt, the CEO and – full disclosure – a longtime friend of mine, he said that Google could not afford to be seen as the vulture picking off the dead carcass of the news industry.

The high-road reason that I was – initially I thought was just kind of blather but I became more persuaded of, is that they think that it is in their interest as providers and indexers of information online. If that information becomes polluted, bad, junky, people are going to have less reason to turn to them.”

The full segment is here:

The other segment worth a listen is the interview with Yochai Benkler, who gives a well-reasoned look at the current transition and some reasons for optimism as host Brooke Gladstone explains:

“And he applauds the transition to a mixed system in which concerned citizens combine their time and expertise with professionals to unearth and disseminate important information. It’s already happening, he notes. A patron-funded independent investigative newsroom called ProPublica won the Pulitzer Prize this year for its coverage of a New Orleans hospital making life and death decisions during Katrina.”

Though I’m not sure that I really buy the idea that ProPublica is really all that new when it comes to news models. Yes, it’s non-profit. But basically it’s a newsroom of professional journalists doing investigative reporting, though funded by a wealthy patron rather than ads. But still, it doesn’t look like the revolution to me in terms of how news is gathered or distributed.

That segment is here: