The good news is Frontline devoting an impressive four-and-a half hours of national prime time to the overall subject of the “future of the news.”
The bad news is that the series contains very little that is either new or news. Moreover, ‘News War’ is more about the war than about the news,as Jeff’s headline story illustrates.

I really wanted to recommend this series and commend Frontline for putting so many resources behind it. But I simply couldn’t–the programming obviously sounded like a good idea in its conception, but in execution it’s actually just another missed opportunity.

I still don’t understand why these newspaper monopolies that got 50% profit margins for decades suddenly deserve to be talked about as if they were an endangered species.

Right. Exactly. Sometimes its a local expose on state funded assisted living homes that comprises an investigative series - and its *these* stories that require legal, and financial resources to pursue. In particular because they are the kinds of stories that fall thru the cracks - about subject matter that might not be comfortable for anyone to hear about.

Jeff, I agree with ya - it’s sad that the Frontline piece concentrated too much on the “us versus them” angle - but for once I heard some concern that the business model no longer works - as Robert Feinman and Oliver Willis also point out.

Like you say here “It’s a business. It’s a new media world. Wake up and figure out what to do about it. ”

Right. Absolutely. Otherwise, pieces like the Inquirer one I just linked to are less likely to be produced, and received by those that need to see them.

One of new media’s missions is to level the playing field by giving individuals across ( dumb AND smart people just like dumb AND smart newspapers; remember there are some very dumb newspapers and old media outlets) the tools to harvest and present their own content. This has happened easily in some areas, such as opinion and commentary. It hasn’t happened fully in the case of investigative or so called “enterprise” reporting, which is labor intensive and requires modes of access – to people and documents – that individual bloggers simply don’t have yet.

Frontline loaded the deck by showcasing precisely this kind of “investigative” or “in depth” work: Scads of people, dozens of interviews left on the cutting room floor, big hype for coverage in the run up to the show, etc. People, especially older Americans of the Woodwardian age, react favorably to this kind of reporting because they have been coached to think simply because a news outlet has access to “powerful” sources it has the goods. Access and gratuitously pompous interviewing techniques become a rhetorical device for locating authority within a journalistic text or broadcast. The trouble is this approach is old and tired and no longer works well. Every overbloated nvestigative or “enterprise” piece is not Watergate.

New media will catch up with “enterprise journalism,” just as Google caught up with search engine design. As news delivery fragments, and younger audiences get all their content from targeted searches, feeds and customized news mashups, anyone will be able sit at a computer and create as good if not better content than Frontline. In two years, we’re looking at an online investigative journalism platform as good, if not better, than its dead tree ancestors. It will require online access to documents and sources, but in many ways that already exists.

This is bad journalism … and bad *for* journalism, too. If editors and reporters buy into this superficial view, we’ll never made the changes necessary to sustain the mission (which is, Jeff, more than a business).

As Abe Lincoln once said, in the midst of a far more profound transformation, “We must disenthrall oursevles, and then we will save out country.”

You consistently slight the need for investigative journalism of the type that requires many months of work to produce a story. Only an organization that has a flow of money from other areas can afford to fund this type of work. The broadcast media hasn’t done a good job of entering this area, most of their investigative stories seem tied to some personal injustices. Uncovering institutional malfeasance is much harder.

This type of reporting has been the area to suffer the most. Nobody misses a story that isn’t investigated since it was buried to begin with. The newspapers may be failing in their own model, but there has been little in the way of innovative ideas as to how this role, at least, is going to remain in the new frontier.