When the Best Stuff Doesn't Make the Paper

The advent of reporter blogs, online chats, podcasts and video is adding new volume and depth of coverage to many key beats. But it's also creating an interesting phenomenon: Some of the best information being uncovered by journalists is showing up in these newfangled venues rather than in traditional publications. And since the average reporter's blog or chat generally is read by a much smaller (if more devoted) audience, you have to start wondering about priorities. Should the reporter's best stuff appear in the newspaper? Or is it OK for it to show up somewhere else?

Here's a quick example, from an online discussion conducted this week by legendary Washington Post sports columnist Tom Boswell. The subject was John Patterson, a sore-armed pitcher cut loose by the Washington Nationals a couple days before:

When I saw his forearm after his first major surgery, last spring, I guess, I gasped. He'd lost much of his basic musculature. Gone from "Wow, bet that guy is a baseball pitcher" to just a normal guy. He didn't seem aware of the change. I doubted he'd get his fastball back unless he somehow rebuilt the whole forearm. Then, this spring, he had another four-inch scar on the forearm. Great interview, really nice guy, but not universally popular in the locker room because he looked like a star and didn't fit the team's blue collar play-hurt mold. Hope he makes it back in Texas. But I doubt it. And I've doubted it for a year.

Um, hello? That's a collection of fantastic insights about the guy who was supposed to be the Nats' No. 1 pitcher before his release—and it's information that never appeared in the print Washington Post, from Boswell or the Nationals beat writers, over the past year. Or anywhere else, as far as I can tell.

Arguably, this is one of the reasons newspapers are suffering: They seem afraid to tell the full story, warts and all. As many pundits and readers have complained, that shirking of journalistic duty applies to important topics, like the Iraq war and the Bush Presidency, not just the sports section. I can think of countless insightful anecdotes and opinions that I've read on reporter blogs or discussions—or heard expressed in journalist TV appearances—that don't seem to make the paper.

The possible reasons for this range from dire to innocent. Is it reporters trying to protect a source? Is it reporters feeling freer with their opinions and inside info in the less formal atmosphere of a blog, chat or TV gig? Whatever, it's frustrating as a reader or viewer to find out that you weren't getting the whole story from traditional coverage.

I think there's a real challenge for editors and reporters here to try to make sure that this sort of deeper reportage finds a much broader audience. If that means moving some of the informality of blogs into the newspaper, fine. If it means reminding reporters that they ultimately work to serve their readers, not their sources, even better. But as long as the good stuff isn't getting into the paper, the industry's decline is just going to accelerate.

Comments

[Frances]

Great Blog, Mark, with a fascinating field to cover. I am a freelance journalist who put in a year and a half of daily posts to my local newspaper's fairly popular community blog. This was a great way for me to learn the newest tools of the trade and to figure out the points you have raised in your post, from a reporter's perspective. My posts were unpaid and unedited and definitely gave me the opportunity to write about local issues and goings on in the community from my own perspective. I received tremendous feedback from the community, with phone calls and emails and even packages at my door with requests on items to write about! I began to realize that my little experiment was gaining momentum and validity, with a lot more time commitment than I had intended. By the time I started receiving comments from an editorial staff member on a rival newspaper in the region, slamming me for using a newspaper web site to promote items of personal interest, I'd had my fill. This led me to Type Pad, where I am completely unaffiliated with any of the publications that I write for on a freelance basis. I definitely weigh up a story as to whether it would best be told in a brief blog post, a magazine article, or news story in the local paper. Print articles which go on to appear on-line do have a greater reach and I'm veering towards magazine and on-line these days.

[Howard Owens]

The passage cuts to close to perspective, which cuts too close to opinion -- and post-Lippmann era journalists are afraid of both.

Advantage blogs.

[Charles Barthold]

I asked a reporter from the FT recently the same question -- why is his most interesting material in blogs, not the paper? He said because the editors won't take it. So -- when an editor thinks conventionally and decides a news item doesn't fit into a pre-designated formula -- the reporter posts it to his blog.