I bring you two insights. Your assignment is to accept the idea that in the newspaper world they could count as insights, not as self-evident truisms that managers of a more farsighted industry would have been honoring for decades.
Thorson is associate dean for graduate studies at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and director of research for the school’s Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, whose mission is to “develop and test ways to improve journalism through new technology and improved processes.” A paper she wrote with two colleagues for next week’s convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication recalls that the present collapse was preceded a few years ago by “a major outcry from professionals and academics alike who warned that the ongoing product investment cuts for the sake of increasing profits were destroying the quality and integrity of newspaper news.” As an example she cites the family-owned Des Moines Register, where before-tax profits in 1985 were about $6 million. But that year the Gannett chain bought the Register, and in the next three years the profits rose to $11 million, then $17 million, and then $20.5 million. “Most of these profit increases,” Thorson writes, “came at the expense of cuts in the newsroom.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“News isn’t just a do-gooder thing,” Thorson says. “News is a moneymaker—quality news.”
The public needs to see the improvement at once. So Thorson calls for “a much bigger paper, not this skinny little thing that rolls under a bush and you can’t find it,” and a lot of new beat reporters. “And after they’re making more money I’d go for more depth—and that would be my investigative team.”
“That’s why Frank is really good, in my opinion,” she replies. What newspapers need and too few have right now are “some friggin’ PhDs.”
Without the Rocky there’d have been no “Deadly Denial,” there’d have been no “As Likely as Not,” and almost certainly there’d have been no Charlie Wolf Nuclear Workers Compensation Act, a bill Senator Mark Udall of Colorado introduced in March to amend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.
