Compelling Journalism Persists Despite Media's Business Struggle

Contrary to popular assumptions,
or desires, American journalism isn't dead. It isn't even unwell. It's
as good, and sometimes as great, as it's ever been.

I have on my desk
three fresh examples. In "Final Salute" (Penguin Press), Jim Sheeler, a
reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, followed the lives of several
military families for a year or more after fathers, husbands,
sons or brothers returned from Iraq in caskets. What the Pentagon has
gone to such lengths to hide and the public has had no reason to follow
beyond the ritual funerals, Sheeler unravels by documenting grief's
infinite, private albums. In "Big Boy Rules" (Da Capo), The Washington
Post's Steve Fainaru does the impossible. He details the lawbreaking
and atrocities of mercenaries ("private security contractors," in
polite company) in Iraq while humanizing them. One in particular, well
known to many Floridians: Jon Cote, the young, popular University of
Florida student who opted for a stint as a mercenary to pay debts and
ended up working for a criminally negligent company, being taken
hostage, and returning, a year-and-a-half later, in a box, headless. I
never thought I'd feel that even mercenaries deserve a final salute.
Then there's "The Forever War" (Knopf) by Dexter Filkins, a New York
Times reporter whose work from Iraq and Afghanistan, epic in breadth
and style, makes Ernie Pyle sound like any old "embed."

That's
just a sampling of this year's crop of extraordinary journalism. What
the reporters have in common, though, is news organizations that were
willing to invest time and money in immense proportions to make the
work possible. Now the Rocky Mountain News may close by January. The
Times is slashing budgets and buying out reporters, or firing them
outright. The Post is in a holding pattern.

Journalism may be
healthy. The business of journalism, never the same thing, is sick, and
often sickening. It's being hammered by a lousy economy (nothing new),
a media landscape exploded by the Internet (totally new) and that old
standard of the newspaper business: A greed for outsized profits that
is only beginning to give way to more realistic, and responsible,
expectations. No week goes by without the announcement of a news
organization -- not just newspapers -- shutting bureaus, firing
employees by the hundreds, going bankrupt, going up for sale (The
News-Journal is in that last category but for more complicated
reasons). So every time I get ready to write this column I wonder
whether it'll be my last. At least I still have the luxury to worry
about what, for thousands of others in the trade, is already fact.
There's a lot of pretending, a lot of guessing, a great deal of
flailing in search of a business model that works. No one knows what
it'll be yet as well as what it won't be anymore. But we're seeing what grasping for the invisible is doing.

What's
left of the great broadsheets and network newscasts makes you miss them
less even as they vanish before your eyes. The Times feels as if it's
on one of those low-calorie diets. It's getting slimmer, lighter,
fluffier, its targeting of the six- and seven-figure set that
ski-vacations north of the Polar Circle but still votes Democratic
increasingly pronounced. The Wall Street Journal is being recreated in
its new deity's image. Like Rupert Murdoch, it's now loud, sensational,
in your face, attributes previously reserved for its editorial pages.
The Los Angeles Times turned into a local gossip sheet just when it was
becoming a must-read. Network news was never more than entertainment.
But when you replace news anchors with nannies such as Katie Couric and
Brian Williams, who treat the news as if it were an after-school
special, it's not even entertaining anymore. No wonder the crazies on
cable such as O'Reilly and Hannity are skimming off boatloads of
network refugees for their audiences.

Several newspaper chains
serving dozens of communities across the country are closing or
shrinking their Washington bureaus, just as they are closing bureaus in
their backyards. They're eliminating individual voices, perspectives
and investigative eyes without which the marketplace of ideas becomes
more like a company store: Everyone gets a scaled-down choice of news
from scaled-down sources just when government needs more prying eyes,
not fewer.

The clamor for more eyes is eerily absent. The idea of
journalism itself is taking a beating from a public either unconcerned
or cheering its collapse. Thank 30 years of ideological media-bashing
for the indifference. There's plenty of anguish over losing GM or
Chrysler, none at all, outside the industry, over losing entire news
organizations. I'm not suggesting that a bailout is in order. There's
no point in propping up an industry that doesn't know where it's going.

But
let's not kid ourselves, either. You can have a democracy without a car
industry. You can even have a strong economy without the press or
democracy. That's China. But you cannot have a democracy of any kind
without a vibrant press. No business model is worth that loss.