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Tim Lee points out that today's journalists have some advantages over their predecessors:
...while it's often true that hard news stories take a "great deal of time to write," the Internet has made the process much easier for many types of news. Most obviously, the laborious process of editing and typesetting stories on strict deadlines is being replaced by much more flexible editing using web-based content management systems. Many primary sources (court decisions, regulatory filings, government data) that once required a physical trip to obtain can now be downloaded off the web. Reporters also have access to a vast new universe of primary sources from user-generated media that simply didn't exist in the past.It's possible that the absolute number of reporters doing "hard news" in the future will be lower than it was in the past. And certainly the next decade will be a tough one for print journalists. But there's nothing fundamentally broken about the "give away content, sell ads" business model. And we're not heading toward a dystopian future in which no one produces hard news.
I got my first reporting gig at an 80,000 circulation community newspaper in 2002. It is quite difficult to adequately emphasize how much more difficult my job would've been without the Internet. Mapquest alone saved me perhaps 30 minutes a day. Reporting before e-mail? I can't imagine it.
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In my youth, the late '70s, I was a reporter for a weekly and then a daily in suburban Chicago. I can tell you what it was like: You spent all day long on the phone, or near the phone waiting for people to return your calls. Phones in those days, incidentally, sat on desks -- they didn't go around in your pocket with you.
Of course, occasionally you went out and interviewed someone in person, usually at his/her office during business hours, and you also went to meetings of local city councils and other agencies and wrote down what happened. And once in a while you covered a live event, like the county fair, or a press conference (although local officials rarely held press conferences in those days). But mostly it was phone work. Particularly engaging was something we reporters called "the Springfield shuffle," which was getting referred from agency to agency to agency when you called the state capital, Springfield, in search of someone who could answer a question about something related to state government.
I also witnessed the transition from writing on typewriters (these are devices you can now see in museums) to the earliest word-processing, which was buggy and unreliable. On typewritten copy you made hand corrections, which meant that you just didn't rework the stuff as much, especially on deadline -- you wrote it, checked and corrected it, then sent it off. That's also pretty much how I wrote my college papers. The luxury of fiddling with every word and sentence until it felt "finished" is a product of word-processing, at least in newspapers (I don't know, maybe the great writers always did it, and maybe bloggers don't do it even today -- Marc Ambinder pretty clearly never looks at any sentence of his twice.)
Since I left daily reporting in 1980, I can't really compare the old environment with today's, but I know that the web greatly eases the work I do researching books and journal articles, and I would think it's a lot easier being a news reporter today too.
It is quite difficult to adequately emphasize how much more difficult my job would've been without the Internet. Mapquest alone saved me perhaps 30 minutes a day. Reporting before e-mail? I can't imagine it.
Don't forget "Teh Google"!! And yet lots of DC based reporters act like they've never heard of it. And look stupid as a result.