I agree that blogs are a great place for people with expertise to write about the subjects that interest them. It’s a major reason I read blogs, too.

But since the context of the discussion was how to improve the performance of MSM, I wanted to point out that as a practical matter, getting experts to write for newspapers, TV, web sites, etc., won’t work very well.

As terrific as blogs are, we still need the traditional media to gather the facts about, say, a major corporate merger in the telecom field. (I work for a business newspaper, so the examples I pick tend to come from business.) It’s not realistic to think that a telecom analyst for a major investment bank is going to write a news story about the transaction. That person might have a blog that offers insight on the deal, and that’s tremendously valuable. But that person isn’t writing the 1,200-word story with all the details about the transaction and comments from all the parties involved.

Experts don’t fit into the economic model of the news business. (To say nothing of the conflicts they’d bring in writing about the fields they work in.) Penny’s right that too much in the media is insipid and ill-informed. I just think the answer is to find more reporters and editors with a broad base of knowledge and the ability to learn.

Yet lots of experts are already writing directly for the public on their blogs. They just aren’t writing for newspapers, where some editor will dumb it down and make them take out most of what motivated them to write in the first place.

Isn’t this the same form over substance problem playing itself out in our public schools?

Scott - you point is well taken. But, honestly, the most incurious people dominate the insipid and overly stylized MSM now. Just read the standard slop or watch the prevailing interviews on the news. It’s pathetic.

I’m not going to defend poor reporting, bias and the various other problems in journalism. But you’re dreaming if you think getting “experts” to write stories is going to be the magic solution.

From a practical standpoint, most experts in key fields — science, medicine, finance, law, etc. — are well-paid, so few if any would ever leave their jobs to become reporters. Even on a free-lance basis, newspapers wouldn’t come close to paying these people adequately for the time and effort that goes into substantial pieces.

And if these people still hold jobs in their fields while writing for the media, how effective can they be in covering news? (Op-ed pieces are something different.) If you’re an investment banker, would you talk with a “reporter” for the local paper who’s also an investment banker at one of your main competitors? I doubt it.

The best reporters are curious people who listen well, gather facts diligently, know enough about the subject to ask intelligent questions and aren’t afraid to ask sources to repeat and explain information they don’t understand. They correct mistakes promptly and fully.

In a perfect world, we’d all be “experts” in everything we cover, or we’d have unlimited budgets to add staff when the need for expertise arises. But that’s not the world we live in.

“The power of the community to decide, of course, asks us to reexamine what we mean when we say that something is “true.” We tend to think of truth as something that resides in the world. The fact that two plus two equals four is written in the stars–we merely discovered it. But Wikipedia suggest a different theory of truth. Just think about the way we learn what words mean. Generally speaking, we do so by listening to people (our parents, first). Since we want to communicate with them (after all, they feed us), we use the words in the same way they do. Wikipedia says judgments of truth and falsehood work the same way. The community decides that two plus two equals four the same way it decides what an apple is: by consensus. Yes, that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus two equals five, then two plus two does equal five. The community isn’t likely to do such an absurd or useless thing, but it has the ability.”

Such implications do translate to the reporting of news, where the degree of aggregated knowledge and information can often have a direct relationship with the value of the story. Journalists are not total experts–not the end-all of information–and the aggregation of knowledge works to direct it to a median. In this respect, networking of knowledge should be encouraged.

As Oliver Stone said, maybe the wisest thing ever to come from his mouth, “It’s when the press writes about something you know about that you realize how wrong they get everything.”

Teach a man a subject and all he knows is that subject. Teach a man how to learn, and any subject in the world is open to him.

How would that work? An overview of physics, engineering, medicine, literature, fine art, history, anthropology, etc as part of the journalism curriculum? How ridiculous. I agree that it would be splendid if these modern news stylists with their form over substance understood with some minimal depth the context of what they are reporting. But, then, if you want substance, you’d not be seeking it in most of MSM anymore.

A pity that Lemann doesn’t advocate for easier access into journalism careers more students with core competencies in anything but journalism who have talented writing skills? His guild mentality is being eroded with every informal and well written site on the internet by people knowledgeable about their field that is bookmarked by readers.

Let me also add that the most fundamental way that journalism “can help inform citizens and thus strengthen democracy” is to report the facts correctly without convenient omissions or falsifications, stop the agenda driven rot, and the pc self-censorship that has diminished the public trust and ability to make informed decisions in a democracy. Lemann is futilely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.