Throughout the decades, newspapers were the main source for all things “news”. Before there were countless morning shows and television news broadcasts and prior to the internet’s endless options to receive information, there was… the paper. The paper was covered by real professionals with an education to back their words. Stories covered in the paper were sophisticated, technical and reported accurately. In Capital Flight by Jodi Enda, she describes Jacoby, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and numerous other publications’ thoughts on today’s paper as an absence of justice.
“I saw that no one was really covering Justice,” Jacoby explains. “The big papers never covered it in depth,” and when cutbacks came, coverage “really fell off a cliff.” Jacoby says there’s “hardly anyone” in the Justice Department’s pressroom and “dust on the desks.” Further, she says, “very few people show up for the daily press gaggle.”
Like many others professionals within the industry they have either been laid off due to cutbacks, or quit their roles within big papers due to their passion for the art of writing and covering real in-depth news. They have searched for other opportunities to display their craft and as of recent, more and more of them have found their new outlets.
Enda accounts the career of Lyle Denniston, a 52-year veteran of the beat. Denniston, used to write about the court for the Baltimore Sun and many other papers and reveals to Enda that he has discovered a newfound editorial freedom with virtually unlimited space. The only downside is the relatively small space.
“Now my audience is in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands,” he says. The upside is that it is… composed mainly of professionals and academics, so “we can write at a level of technicality and score greater than any daily newspaper could use.”
Mainstream news today is fast paced and extreme. News will account for the big disasters and scandals but doesn’t seem to have the time and resources to reveal the in between stories that news was founded on. Thankfully, these stories have not been lost and the internet has provided a home for these writers to continue to disperse some real news amongst the readers.