Monday morning quarterback

Monday mornings in the local daily newspapers often mimic the general overall attitude of the population that buys them: soft-minded, disinterested and not altogether too happy to be returning from two days of revelry. Often times, the Monday paper is utterly lacking in news content and instead relies on cushy feature articles to fill out both the front page and local section. Perhaps this is a projection of what people want as they return to the daily grind; a sort of light-heartedness they carried through a weekend sipping Mai Thais by the pool or grilling up some dead cow with the fam.

But occasionally, there’s a nugget of hard news to be plucked from the paper that’s worth more than a bathroom read during the morning ponder. At times, a truly interesting and newsworthy piece can be buried beneath the county fair wrap-ups and articles chronicling had-to-be there events.

Take for instance this dreadfully ironic Associated Press gem mined from the pages and pages of fluff choking the B-section in the Daily Gazette. The piece discusses a recent study conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which found today’s newspapers are becoming “niche reads” as a result of narrowing their focus. Obviously, this narrowing is a result of tighter budgets, while the tighter budgets a result of waning advertising revenues and decreases in readership, et cetera.

As a result, American newspapers no longer stock bureaus in far-flung places or invest in resources to cover events out of the local purview. This shows too, because most front page coverage is devoted to articles of local interest. Unless something truly calamitous happens, most national news and nearly all international news gets truncated, pushed to the inside pages and obscured. In other words, the outlook for journalism is grim, right?

Not quite. The study found that the journalism industry is getting younger by the minute. Younger journalists mean a greater number of reporters are capable sucking the marrow from the technology now readily available to them. Their editors are slowly starting to take notice by allowing a greater diversity of projects in the newsroom.

The bottom line is that Web advertising hasn’t earned greedy publishers the same margin of profits they made during the pre-Internet days. Editors share a consensus among that something must eventually break and convince advertisers to at last buy online space as they would have in the paper back in the Dinosaur days of print.

If this breaking point taken as a given, then it is only a matter of biding time until the levee breaks, flooding newsrooms with the cash they need to produce hard-hitting journalism. One of these biding schemes manifested itself today in the Times Union, which produced an “exclusive” investigative story without allocating a single resource.

Posted on the main page of the TU’s Web site Tuesday morning was a piece about the potential environmental impacts resulting from natural gas drilling in New York’s upstate region. The author is among a dozen investigative reporters working with a non-profit organization called ProPublica. Founded less than a year ago, ProPublica is the brainchild of Paul Steiger, the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. The Manhattan-based organization claims it will eventually employ up to two dozen fulltime reporters, thus creating the “the largest staff in American journalism devoted solely to investigative reporting.”

“ProPublica will focus exclusively on journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them,” Steiger said after the organization’s founding last year. “We will be non-partisan and non-ideological, adhering to the strictest standards of journalistic impartiality and fairness.”

ProPublica is funded through an annual $10 million contribution through the Sandler Foundation, which was created in 2006 by a $1.3 billion contribution from former Golden West Financial owners Herb and Marion Sandler. Eventually, the news agency will seek other revenue sources, possibly from readers. However, it will maintain its non-profit status, thereby reducing the level of revenue needed for sustainability.

Stories produced by ProPublica will be farmed out to a variety of news agencies “in a manner designed to maximize its impact.” News organizations accepting the stories will receive them free of charge and with a period of “exclusivity,” according to ProPublica; an interesting prospect to say the least.

On a side note, it is rather incredible the TU is relying on this service, seeing as though they are one of, if not the only paper in the Capital Region with a genuine investigative reporter. Perhaps ProPublica should farm out its “exclusivity” to some of dailies in more dire condition, rather than augmenting the soon-to-be monopoly enjoyed by the ubiquitous TU. Not to mention, the TU’s investigative reporter seems a bit more well-rounded than the ProPublica fellow regurgitated from Columbia University’s journalism program.

Perhaps this is the model the United States needs to reinvigorate its newsrooms. ProPublica certainly has some lofty goals to reintroduce some much needed hard news into the mainstream of journalism. And perhaps taking a bit of capitalism out of the news business will spin new ideas among an industry that is perennially on life support. Still, it’s a sad day when the state of journalism has sunk to a point where a non-profit is needed to save the very lifeblood of the business.