“Opponents of the death penalty looking to exonerate wrongly accused prisoners say their efforts have been hobbled by the dwindling size of America’s newsrooms, and particularly the disappearance of investigative reporting at many regional papers.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Tribune is far from being the only publication to lay off copy editors and proofreaders, scaling back the quality-control process and paying a price. But it was Kern front and center on the Newberry panel, and as he spoke about emerging business models I thought about the sociological theory that holds that a single broken window that goes unrepaired can lead to the decline of an entire street. Leaf through a Tribune (or any other newspaper) these days and you spot more and more broken windows.
Donald Hayner, editor of the Sun-Times, thinks the conversation among journalists is so skewed toward “change all the time” that the fundamentals get lost. “There’s so much thinking outside the box,” he said. “I think we’ve got to have somebody in the box. . . . The fundamental gathering of news still sells, and the bigger that news the bigger it sells.” He’d like to see Chicago’s news organizations join forces and create a common firewall behind which their gathered news will be protected from online scavengers who read but don’t pay. The problem, he said, is that everyone’s too independent to agree to such a thing — and antitrust laws might also be a problem. So Hayner talks about his idea, but he hasn’t pursued it.
