If the daily newspaper disappears—an outcome I’m still unwilling to accept—it won’t have been done in by its eccentricities.
“I think the elephant in the room is the concept of having a reporter spend 20 months and 50K words to document whether Scientist A or Scientist B truly deserved credit. I submit it is that kind of thinking that is a big part of why newspapers are in the trouble they’re in today. Newsrooms pursue ‘good stories’ without thinking through exactly why it is, or isn’t, a ‘good’ story.
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“Is it an interesting yarn? I guess. Is it worth putting in the paper? Sure, all things being equal. But things are never equal. Everything comes with opportunity costs. What stories and issues were not covered by Crewdson (or the Tribune) because of the resources committed to the Gallo story?
Besides, it’s easy to say now that Crewdson’s subject was just an academic pissing match. Back in 1989 nothing about AIDS seemed inconsequential, and if America’s foremost AIDS researcher was making false claims, being told how and why struck a number of readers as something more than a reporter’s self-indulgence.
You’d think American newspapers were failing for the same reason the Big Three auto manufacturers are—because they’ve lost touch with their market. But the Tribune isn’t losing readers and advertisers to Tokyo’s Asahi Shimbun. It’s losing them to a paradigm shift.
I wonder why she thinks it’s even cathartic.v
