The PBS Newshour ran a segment on Monday night about the Academy Award for best picture that went to the movie “Spotlight.”
Quoting Margaret Sullivan, outgoing public editor for The New York Times:
“The film ‘Spotlight’ is powerful and moving, but it raises troubling questions about the state of local investigative reporting today and its future.”
The moderator asked: “What was troubling?”
Sullivan replied.
Staff numbers are way down. Many papers have to or have felt they have had to dismantle their investigative teams. And the resources just aren’t there that were there even 10 years ago. It’s really troubling.
The segment noted that newspaper staff have declined by 40 percent since 2003, and there had already been a steep decline before that.
And Steve Engelberg, the editor in chief of ProPublica, pinned at least a big part of the economic problem on the belief held by many people that content on the internet should be free.
But there’s a bigger problem. One of the people I had lunch with yesterday said he gets most of his news online, but one day brought a newspaper home.
“What’s that?” his 6-year old son asked, pointing to the unfamiliar object.
“It’s a newspaper,” he replied.
The boy continued.
“Is that like a magazine?”
How do you explain a newspaper?
“No, not like a magazine. These are printed every day, and then get delivered to people.”
The explanation went on from there.
But the troubling idea, if you’re at all interested in the news business, is a new generation that may not even know what a newspaper is, what it is useful for, or how to use it, much less appreciate it and its content.
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Here is a dissenting view on the “heroic journalism” represented by Spotlight.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/29/oscar-hangover-special-why-spotlight-is-a-terrible-film
John, that dissenting view is a rambling joke. did Donald Trump write it?
I carry no water for the Catholic church, however, I can see the point made by the article: that in the hysteria generated some innocent people may have been swept up. We’ve seen similar phenomena before. The role of the press has not necessarily been one of unalloyed good.
Maybe the Oscar will encourage more students to study journalism, the way Woodward and Bernstein did years ago? Well, we can always hope.
Well, the Oscar timing could not have been more prescient. In the San Francisco East Bay, six newspapers are folding into just two. The 150-year-old Oakland Tribune is being shut down, and the San Jose Mercury News is morphing into the Mercury News.
Much of the long story, investigate stories can be found in the progressive weekly papers like the East Bay Express.