the audit

Monday Links: Reuters Investigates, Debt Iceberg, USAT

October 12, 2009

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.