Chris Roush reports that Reuters is hiring some investigative reporters, a welcome development in a time of reduced journalistic ambitions. But to keep it in perspective, “Howell said that there will be no specific investigative reporting unit.”
— Here’s one to balance out the recovery talk: Economist Thomas Palley says at the FT that we’re not out of the woods yet on that whole Great Depression Part Deux thing. “The US economy has hit a debt iceberg.” That whole green shoots thing? Well, “As for mainstream economists, their theoretical models were blind-sided by the crisis and only predict recovery because of the assumptions in the models.”
— USA Today, like The New York Times, brings in more revenue from circulation than it does from advertising.
— Poynter’s Rick Edmonds runs some back-of-the-napkin numbers on how much less newspaper newsrooms are spending these days. It’s very rough, but he comes up with $1.6 billion less, (though it looks like it should be $1.8 billion to me), or $4.4 billion total. This, of course, means a dramatic decline in hard-news coverage. The creepy thing is it’s impossible to know what we’re missing.
Ryan Chittum is a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and deputy editor of The Audit, CJR’s business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at rc2538@columbia.edu. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanchittum.