Brave New World

Every week seems to bring another herald of the impending demise of reporting as we know it. Last week, the New York Times Company threatened to shut the Boston Globe unless the newspaper's unions agreed to $20 million in concessions. And in my home town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the Intelligencer Journal (founded in 1794, making it the 7th oldest newspaper in the United States) and the Lancaster New Era (first printed in 1796) have announced that they will begin publishing a single morning edition starting June 29.

Though the papers share a corporate owner and a newsroom, they have historically maintained relatively distinct editorial voices, with the Intelligencer Journal (Lancaster's morning paper) maintaining a relatively liberal line while the Lancaster New Era was often frothingly conservative. In addition to depriving readers of a diversity of viewpoints and thoroughgoing news coverage of Lancaster County, the move will also result in the layoffs of dozens of employees at both papers. Ironically, the Lancaster New Era was my first taste of newsroom journalism when I spent a day there when I was something in the neighborhood of 14 years old during a middle school career day.

The challenges such an ever-contracting news environment present to independent journalists such as myself, many of whom live hand-to-mouth on a razor thin profit margin that separates solvency from destitution (as I do), are substantial and ongoing. With the news business, particularly in the United States, on life-support, journalists need to be ever more dogged and creative in the means by which they are able to continue doing the kind of in-depth, on-the-ground reporting that someone blogging behind a desk is unable to do. But that process itself - applying for grants and looking towards non-traditional avenues of publication - is also often a stark reminder of the relative disposability and vulnerability of the position of reporters in this current environment.

A case study from my own experience.

During the process of applying for a grant with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for a project in Afghanistan, I received an email from Jon Sawyer, the Center's Director, telling me that the Pulitzer Center had recently struck an agreement with GlobalPost.com under which Pulitzer Center grantees agreed to write at least one short piece (600-800 words) suitable for use on the website. Sawyer went on to write that these stories would then be featured on GlobalPost - a for-profit venture founded by Philip Balboni and Charles Sennot - and afterwards made available for purchase/republication by Global Post subscribers. After Global Post used the article on their own website (for free), the “re-use” fee, if the articles were indeed re-sold, would net Pulitzer Center grantees the princely sum of $200 per use.

Asked if I would be amenable to filing a story/photo for GlobalPost, I responded that I would be more than happy to write for the website as long as they paid upon publication, as is the norm, not upon re-sale. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sawyer’s enthusiasm for the Afghanistan project, which he had previously spoke of in the most eager terms, cooled tremendously, and no grant was in the end dispersed.

Perhaps I should not read too much into the incident, but I found this episode troubling in what it suggested, which was a surreptitious compromising of the Pulitzer Center’s publicly-stated position of providing "travel grants to cover hard costs associated with upcoming travel for an international reporting project” in support of a for-profit enterprise. Writing to GlobalPost about this, I received a prompt though rather self-important response from Rick Byrne, GlobalPost’s Director of Communications & Marketing. It stated, in part:

GlobalPost didn’t need the work of Pulitzer Center journalists to fulfill its editorial budget, but we wanted to provide them an opportunity for additional compensation in addition to the exposure.

But of course, GlobalPost, which describes itself as “relying on the enduring values of great journalism: integrity, accuracy, independence and powerful storytelling,” is not exactly turning down the free labour of journalists to provide itself with content either, is it?


So, what are committed independent journalists to do? How does one feed oneself and care for one’s family in such an environment? I have never for a moment doubted the value of principled, investigative independent reporting that exposed often-ignored truths and challenged the powerful in their positions in privilege, whether it be in Haiti, Congo, Australia or Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Far from saving this kind of reporting, though, my fear is that entities such as GlobalPost, which seek to replace the actual jobs once offered by newspapers with networks of underpaid, overworked freelancers lacking in such perks as health insurance, may in fact help hasten its demise.

We as journalists are now piloting a fragile ship through stormy seas, and I hope that we can make it to the far shore. Do my fellows journos - or others - have any thoughts on the matter?