Laurie Garrett, the prize-winning Newsday reporter, left the Melville, N.Y., paper Monday with a blistering memo to her colleagues that may provoke debate elsewhere in the newspaper industry.
Well, there went the gold watch.
"When I started out in journalism the newsrooms were still full of old guys with blue collar backgrounds who got genuinely indignant when the Governor lied or somebody turned off the heat on a poor person's apartment in mid-January. They cussed and yelled their ways through the day, took an occasional sly snort from a bottle in the bottom drawer of their desk and bit into news stories like packs of wild dogs, never letting go until they'd found and told the truth. If they hadn't been reporters most of those guys would have been cops or firefighters. It was just that way. ..."Honesty and tenacity (and for that matter, the working class) seem to have taken backseats to the sort of 'snappy news', sensationalism, scandal-for-the-sake of scandal crap that sells. This is not a uniquely Tribune or even newspaper industry problem: this is true from the Atlanta mixing rooms of CNN to Sulzberger's offices in Times Square. Profits: that's what it's all about now. But you just can't realize annual profit returns of more than 30 percent by methodically laying out the truth in a dignified, accessible manner. And it's damned tough to find that truth every day with a mere skeleton crew of reporters and editors.
"This is terrible for democracy. I have been in 47 states of the USA since 9/11, and I can attest to the horrible impact the deterioration of journalism has had on the national psyche. I have found America a place of great and confused fearfulness."
You know, it's tempting to just agree and applaud.
It's more tempting to ask why she waited until after she quit.
As they say, better late than never. We all have our own levels and hers was post-employment.
You'll never hear honesty like that from dan rather.
Shall we wait to see if Mr. Spector has a response
Based on my experience at various Toronto papers, I'd say the rot had definitely set in around the time reporters thought they deserved to eat in the same restaurants, wear the same clothes, go to the same parties and live in the same neighbourhoods as the people who signed their cheques and - especially in the realm of business reporting - appeared in their stories. The fringes of Rosedale and Forest Hill, and neighbourhood like the Annex, are full of reporters and editors paying far too high a mortgage than their wage allows, and going into debt sending their kids to the same private schools their bosses send their kids to. Lifestyle journalism is even worse, considering how poorly it pays...