Radio Sweethearts

It used to make me angry to see Bob Garfield poking at the internet with a stick to see if it bites. And then it just made me sad. Now I just sort of hear it, note it, and move on. The man has blogs; he knows about the internet. He just seems to think that the internet will kill newspapers, rather than force them to evolve in (potentially) uncomfortable ways.

What’s more, Bob interviews Steve Engleberg, managing editor for ProPublica – an investigative journalism-focused Web site – and both men lament the always-impending, never-arriving death of print journalism without realizing that, dudes, the internet is kind of a big thing. It doesn’t bring destruction, it brings a new life, though it does necessitate an evolution.

Thank your lucky stars, then, that Brooke Gladstone is back and kicking ass as the Peabody Award winning savior of the American newspaper!

She interviews The City University of New York’s Jeff Jarvis about the same thing (the current state of investigative journalism) and hits the nail on the head. The internet kills one business model, but totally brings another to the front. She begins, “As newspaper circulation sinks, the number of people logging on to newspaper websites rises.”

Exactly. And a big reason this happens – and works – is reverse publishing. I’ve talked to people in Memphis who praise the Commercial Appeal’s Web site, because by the time they’ve sat down to read the newspaper, they’ve already read the stories online.

Kerry reads the Sunday New York Times every week, in one sitting. It’s been more than once that I’ve been ready to talk to her about a story because I’d read it on Saturday night, thumbing through my NYTimes.com RSS feeds.

This is brilliant, because the internet’s inherent speed and efficency (not to mention the low cost of online publishing) make Web-based newspapers a much more robust and up-to-date version of the paper. Readers stay more fully informed at a lower cost, and though the revenue models change, they have not gone away.

Advertising, done right, is tasteful, and though there is fear about tools like the Firefox plugin AdBlock Pro, there’s no guarantee in print media that people will pay attention to the ads anyway. The point of advertising is to get the ad to the people who don’t mind seeing it – and especially to those who want to see it.

But something even better is that the internet can welcome new forms of journalism – advocacy and crowd-sourcing. And that can also send traffic to newspaper’s sites, which they can then monetize via advertising and/or merchandising.

Also in this week’s investigative reporting-themed episode of “On the Media:”

• a repeat of the Michael Hersh interview about the My Lai Massacre from a few months ago (reporter calls Brooke “kid” and it’s totally adorable, like the Mark Spitz/Michael Phelps interview on NBC this week.)
• Dana Priest on uncovering prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• Jackson (Miss.) Clarion Ledger’s Jerry Mitchell on reinvestigating Civil Rights-era crimes.
• A really great story on investigative reporting in cinema.

This week’s highlights/recap post was written by Matthew and edited, then posted by Kerry, who went to bed too early to really look at this before it should have gone up (sometime Sunday night), but who would also be quite pleased to see the links and praise for the paper she works for.