Report: how to save journalism

What will become of journalism?

That is the central question addressed in “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” a report by Washington Post Vice President at Large Leonard Downie Jr. and Columbia School of Journalism professor Michael Schudson, released Tuesday by the school.

“We’ve been dependent on newspapers for the bulk of our serious accountability reporting for a long time, and by good fortune, newspapers were for a long time quite affluent in an advertising-supported model,” Schudson said in an interview. “Things have turned around very quickly.”

“It’s comprehensive and forward-looking,” School of Journalism Dean Nicholas Lemann, who commissioned the report, said in an interview. “This [accountability journalism] is a function that is vital in a democracy and needs to be supported, and has been mainly supported by newspapers. It is not going to be supported at that level anymore.”

The recommendations Downie and Schudson make range from common-sensical to highly provocative, as when they write, “It may not be essential to save or promote any particular news medium, including printed newspapers. … What is paramount is preserving independent, original, credible reporting, whether or not it is popular or profitable, and regardless of the medium in which it appears.”

Added Lemann, “Newspapers will continue to be the home of the plurality of American news reporters, but the numbers are never going to get back to what they were. What you’ll see instead is a proliferation of smaller, new players in journalism.”

The report eschews the increasingly common view that journalism cannot be saved in favor of an extensively researched proposal for doing just that. In particular, instead of bemoaning the rise of the Internet as the killer of print journalism, Downie and Schudson suggest using it as a means to improve the industry.

“The very instrument that has been a significant cause of that decline [in newspaper profits], the Internet, may be the source of a solution,” Schudson said. “We’re looking at a survey of the new—mostly quite small, but impressive—experiments in online journalism. Some of these are quite remarkable, and are already beginning to compensate for the gaps that are turning up in national news coverage in the mainstream press.”

The report notes in particular the contributions of online, nonprofit outlets like ProPublica, which produces news content for its own Web site and for other media.

At Columbia, students work on this model. Beginning students in the School of Journalism are assigned a neighborhood in New York City to cover, and their articles are posted online. Additionally, 15 students per year participate in the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.

“They produce a lot of work that’s appeared on NPR, on commercial networks, in the New York Times,” Schudson said. “Students’ work is done directly for the classroom, but it goes immediately out into the public media.”

But even if new media outlets succeed in producing the quantity and quality of reporting to which Americans are accustomed, the problem of funding remains.

Toward that end, the report “encourages more philanthropy, and the expansion of existing public media, public radio,” Schudson said. “It encourages the government to help provide some funds for local reporting.”

Ultimately, “It’s meant to be provocative. What we wanted was to have it stimulate discussion, and it’s doing that,” Lemann said. “This is a moment when a lot is changing in journalism, and it’s important to me that the school play a leadership role, as the future of our profession is at stake.”

The report—funded largely by the Charles H. Revson Foundation, though Lemann declined to provide the total cost—was released online on Tuesday, and will be published in the Columbia Journalism Review.

To promote the report, Downie and Schudson appeared Tuesday evening at the New York Public Library with University President Lee Bollinger. A similar event takes place tonight in Washington, D.C., and will feature members of Congress and Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. On Thursday at 6:30 p.m., they will appear with Lemann at the School of Journalism.