In late 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle broke news implicating legendary left fielder Barry Bonds in a doping scandal. The Chronicle’s reporting led to Bonds’s indictment and the imprisonment of the founder of BALCO, a company that produced and distributed performance-enhancing drugs. It also blew open a section of the sports beat whose effects are still reverberating today.
For refusing to reveal their original source for the BALCO Affair during a grand jury investigation into the laboratory’s practices, however, Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams—despite affidavits from, among others, Carl Bernstein—were sentenced to eighteen months in prison. A plea agreement reached by their source, BALCO attorney Troy Ellerman, later spared the reporters from jail time.
Now, in early 2009, there’s rampant speculation that the Chronicle will soon be folding. If it does, we can safely assume that innovative journalistic entities—hyperlocal sites, microfunded reporting, niche investigative outfits—will emerge to take the Chronicle’s place.
But we wonder: Will those entities have the clout, power, and resources to stand up to the institutions that would challenge the stories they report—to defend reporters like Fainaru-Wada and Williams, and the stories they produce? Do you need a big institution to stand up to big institutions, or to support those stories that stand up to big institutions? In other words: Does size matter?
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Size does matter, but I think that increasingly there will be ways to amass such journalistic clout that do not require an institution on the scale of The New York Times. It might be through collaboration--rather than one news outlet taking on the governor's office, for instance, you have a network of newspapers, TV news outlets, independent bloggers, open-government groups, etc. It might be that a single rich and committed foundation-- or a private university, or an NGO--funds a newsgathering operation, and provides clout in the form of reputation, legal counsel, etc. Or it might be that, as news outlets partner with the public, through social networks or however, that the citizens provide a whole new form of journalistic clout. When the government, or a large corporation, attempts to intimidate and/or crush independent journalism, the journalists need the confidence and the resources to fight back. A lone blogger--or even a whole room full of bloggers--just won't have that. But we need to be looking for new sources of such clout, even as we try to preserve the most important elements of our omnibus news outlets.
#1 Posted by Brent Cunningham, CJR on Fri 6 Mar 2009 at 02:52 PM