I’ve talked to several people from Bellevue and Redmond who don’t care that newspapers are struggling and dying. The reason they don’t care is that whenever the Seattle Times or the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote about a topic they were involved in, they felt that the newspaper got it wrong, wrong, wrong.
If you think about it, getting your news directly from the source is only a bad thing if the source is less trustworthy than the filter.
No longer can a reporter excuse a little bit of ignorance by being the only route to public attention. Here’s the real lesson: if someone else can write it better than you, don’t write it.
I realize this idea is going to get some pushback. After all, isn’t summarizing complex issues part of the journalistic toolbox? Well, not really.
That ended up being sort of a shortcut – the reporter acts as a go-between for an expert on any given issue, mostly because newspapers couldn’t go through the trouble of finding competent writers on-the-fly for any given issue.
But that doesn’t mean that readers ever really liked it.
If you want the filter to stay (and there are many good reasons to want one), then you need to make it valuable. Don’t just translate, dumb down, or pretty up the message – add to it. Do the meta-journalism required to add context to what an expert has written elsewhere (and link to it).
Because otherwise there’s no reason for your reader to stick around.
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Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry. 
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
My experience is that when sources complained that we got it “wrong, wrong, wrong,” it was either a) there was one thing wrong and they inflated it to say the whole article was wrong, or b) the reporter asked questions about things they didn’t want covered or shifted the focus off their message.
That said, you raise a good point. Merely reguritating a press release isn’t going to cut it anymore. Reporters need to really do some work, ask some questions, find the answers, call other sources, do a little analysis … in other words, “report.”
We’re probably seeing the end of the days of the GA, or “general assignment,” reporter. There were a lot of those folks around and they did yeoman’s work, taking on just about subject and, in a short time, becoming a mini-expert and writing about it. But, when people are doing that kind of work, they are more likely to produce an error. Someone who has the time to really become an expert will be less likely to make dumb mistakes (but may make bigger ones … but that’s another conversation).
My concern is: Will journalists be able to have the time they need to become experts and add value to routine coverage? One thing that large news organizations did well was to provide the time and resources so journalists could really learn their area, dig deep and produce great reporting. We may be losing that, in the short term at least.
Curt: Interesting you’d say that; it seems like with all the buzz around neighborhood blogs, everyone’s aiming to become a general assignment reporter. I almost see news sources turning into a handful of those and supplementing themselves with the opposite of what you mentioned—experts who have the time to (occasionally) become journalists. (Note: I’m not necessarily advocating this, it just looks like that’s where we’re headed.)