Newsworthiness

(Continued from yesterday.) The virtual doesn't suspend the real rules of business. It destroys them. For decades, any media was the preserve of those who produced it, and more importantly, those who distributed it. Along came the Internet. Anybody could create. Download. And distribute. The whole edifice of limited supply, on which complex media empires had been built, would not work on the net...

In a world where everything is free, how do you sell? It's the challenge that sites that wish to become pay are grappling with. Last month, the Indore-based Hindi daily Naidunia, partly owned by Vinay Chhajlani of the Webdunia Network, began to charge a Rs 1,000 per year subscription fee. One more to join the bandwagon of the "sell-content-make-money" brigade was the Living Media group, that has...

The good news--if you look hard enough, you can find some--may be that the events of September 11 produced both sterling journalism and a higher sense of journalism's purpose. After a summer of Gary Condit and man-eating sharks, acts of domestic terrorism and the specter of an international war against it shook the public and the media from their mutual embrace of the trivial, their romance with...

Back in August, when I agreed to write a piece on the future of journalism, I figured that peering ahead to explore where we're going wouldn't be terribly hard for a journalism historian like me who has spent a lot of time peering back to explore where we've been. So much seemed predictable. More media companies would merge or expand, leading to more random acts of synergy and more blatant concern...

The sins of the press -- and they were plentiful -- hardly went unnoticed in the early decades of the last century. The early critics -- Will Irwin, Walter Lippmann, Upton Sinclair, and George Seldes -- were biting, outrageous, irreverent, setting a standard of readability that later critics have been hard pressed to match. In 1911, Will Irwin, a former newspaper reporter and editor of McClure's...

Jonathan Z. Larsen worked at Time magazine as an editor and correspondent from 1965 to 1973, was editor of New Times from 1974 to 1978, when the magazine died, and The Village Voice from 1989 to 1994. He has written for New York magazine, Manhattan Inc., and New England Monthly, as well as CJR. The press over the last forty years has been on a long roller coaster ride, at least in terms of quality...

"I BELIEVE IN THE PROFESSION of journalism. I believe that the public journal is a public trust; that all connected with it are, to the full measure of their responsibility, trustees for the public; that acceptance of lesser service than the public service is a betrayal of this trust." --Walter Williams The Journalist's Creed 1914 "W E STAND FOR EXCELLENT service to customers and communities, a...

Consider the various ways in which newspapering's fitful struggles with profit pressures set us journalists against ourselves, cause us to lose our bearings, and behave against type. They rob us, for one thing, of our reporting edge. If any other, equally important, business in town were downsizing as newspapers have been, we'd be all over the story. We'd never let other executives get away with...

After almost a decade of smooth sailing, media company profits plummeted this spring as a rapidly declining stock market spurred a broad downturn. Starting in Silicon Valley and then spreading across the country, executives began to talk about hard choices to maintain profitability, including potential layoffs and other cutbacks affecting editorial content. At one newspaper, the San Jose Mercury...

In 1964 the Pulitzer Prize went to The Philadelphia Bulletin in a new reporting category. The award honored the Bulletin for reporting that police officers in that city were running a numbers racket right out of their station house, and it presaged a new wave of scrutiny of police corruption in American cities. The award had one other significance as well. It marked formal recognition by the print...