By Tim Redmond
The Columbia Journalism Review trashed the Chronicle this week, in a harsh, pointed and entirely on-target piece by Pulitzer Prize winning reporter David Cay Johnston.
Johnston’s chief complaint: The Chronicle has done a miserable job of reporting on its own possible demise. In sharp contrast, he says, the Seattle P-I ran some well-reported stories about the papers’s closing that let readers know what was actually going on.
The blog post raises some interesting journalistic questions, though, that are going to be echoing through this entire debate about the future of newspapers.
The first thing I noticed when I read Johnston’s piece was that he singled out the Chron’s editor, Ward Bushee:
under editor Ward Bushee the Chronicle has provided little actual news reporting about its prospects for dissolution unless its unions agree to drastic job cuts and givebacks for those who remain on the payroll.* Mostly, Bushee gave Chronicle readers unsigned “staff reports”—actually rewritten Hearst press releases.
He later attacks Phil Bronstein, the former Chron editor who is still a top Hearst executive:
At least the careful reader found out that Phil Bronstein, the journalist who is now editor-at-large, has abandoned that role to become an unregistered lobbyist seeking political favors for his employers.
Johnston is a careful, weidely respected reporter who does his homework. And in this case, his analysis of the situation seems entirely accurate. The Chron hasn’t been giving us the real story of what’s going on — and the stuff left off the news pages is really interesting.
But I was surprised that neither Bushee nor Bronstein were quoted in the piece; I’ve always thought that before you attack someone in print (or online) — particularly when you call into question their professionalism or ethics — you should call first to get that person’s response. It’s not only common courtesy and standard journalistic practice; it makes for a better story.
So I emailed both Bushee and Bronstein, and both confirmed that Johnston had never contacted them. Bushee:
I will not comment about the Chronicle’s situation during the union negotiation period. I’ve told this to every reporter who has called to ask.
I have never been asked for comment by the (sic) David Cay Johnson. I was called by him one evening several weeks ago to tell me to look up another story on CJR.com — and then he promptly hung up.
In his latest posting on CJR, he continues to get my name wrong (my father, who has been dead for seven years, was Ward Bushee Jr.). But that is only the start of his errors.
Bronstein:
I’m not going to debate someone who has no real information and hasn’t tried to get any.
In general, we all ought to be talking about the value newsrooms and journalists bring to society – as Bruce Bruggman (sic) did very articulately the other night – to anyone who is willing to listen.
As columnist J.R. Labbe wrote in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about that paper, “This newspaper gave more ink to the campaign to save the Texas Ballet Theater than it has to making this case for its own future. Time for that to change.”
Okay, fair enough. But here’s where it gets interesting.
I called Johnston to discuss all of this, and he was happy to talk to me. “This was a blog,” he said. “If I were writing a story for the New York Times, I would have absolutely called them.”
Why is a blog at CJR any different from a newspaper story? Johnston:
“I’m the definintion of a dinosaur, but I’m trying to embrace the idea that this is a new era. This is an experiment for me. I’m trying to see what happens when we embrace the values of the blog world. What if we just write what we see? I’ll take some slings and arrows, but I’m trying it out.”
He promised to correct the error on Bushee’s name, and did.
David Cay Johnston has done some phenomenal work He’s a perfect example of the value of a major newspaper — the New York Times had the money to pay him to spend weeks and months digging into the federal tax code so he could tell the world how government policies were helping the rich screw the poor. We’d all be a lot less informed without him.
But I have to say, with all due respect to one of the great reporters of our time, I don’t think a blog for CJR is any different than a story in the Times. The world of journalism is changing, and in a few years, none of us will be putting stories on dead trees any more — but the delivery vehicle isn’t the issue. There will be millions of bloggers who comment on things, which is a positive development and I love it, but there will also have to be real news institutions that pay staff people to report stories. And those reporters still have an obligation to call the objects of their attacks and scorn and get a response.
The future isn’t going to be about newspapers vs. online publications. It’s gong to be about journalists doing one kind of job, and others using the web to do something different. Not bad, not wrong — just different.