PBS.org’s MediaShift recently hosted a two-part debate by two men with big credentials and even bigger opinions. The issue was whether newspapers should charge for online content.

Moderator Mark Glaser did his best to keep the dispute civil. Taking the pro-micropay position was David Carr, who writes the “Media Equation” column for the business section of the New York Times. In the other corner, opposing micropayments – virulently opposing micropayments – was Mike Masnick, an outspoken and influential blogger and founder of the Techdirt website. The photo at right not them.

Read The Great Debate on Micropayments and Paid Content, Part 1, then Part 2.

RC

A few weeks ago after reading a stunning op-ed piece about torture published in the New York Times we were moved to lament how tragic it would be to lose the newspapers and magazines that generate such gems of investigative reporting. There just didn’t seem to be anything remotely comparable being produced in the blogs, even the best of them like Huffington Post. “Investigative journalism is the lantern we shine on the slimy horrors crawling under the rocks of our society. We must- must – find a way to preserve it,” I urged.

Admittedly, that was written more from a pained heart than a clear head. The truth is, magazines and newspapers are being relentlessly driven to desperation by fundamental and inexorable market forces and no plaintive cri de coeur is going to reverse the tide.

Fortunately for us, Arianna Huffington, the website’s founder, is blessed with a clear head. Responding to the crisis in in-depth reportage, she announced that Huffpost in collaboration with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors will underwrite the work of a number of investigative reporters to the tune of $1.75 million. Huffington said she and the donors were “concerned that layoffs at newspapers were hurting investigative journalism at a time when the nation’s institutions need to be watched closely.”

She hopes to draw from the ranks of laid-off journalists.The enterprise will be known as the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, according to an Associated Press report. Some 10 staff journalists, coordinating with freelance writers, will focus their efforts initially on the nation’s economy. Some details of the structure and thinking behind the fund are provided in this statement by Jay Rosen, associate professor of journalism at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and a senior advisor to the project. And Jeff Jarvis, blogging for The Buzz Machine, beautifully places the project into the media ecosystem, writing:

The future of journalism is not about some single new-fangled product and company taking over from the old-fangled and monopolistic predecessor. News come from a broad ecosystem with many players adding in under many models for many reasons. News organizations will organize news in this diverse new framework, aggregating, curating, organizing. Laid-off journalists are starting blogs, alongside other bloggers. Some people will volunteer, podcasting their school-board meetings, just because they care. When we demand transparency from government as a default, data will become part of the news ecosystem we can all examine. Some of this will be supported by advertising, some by contributions from foundations, some by contributions from individuals, some by volunteer effort. And it will all add up to a new pie, one slice of which will be efforts such as [Huffington Post's].

The Huffington crossover operation could point the way to a healthy hybrid of traditional and Web reportage. Stories developed by journalists under this plan would undoubtedly be disseminated in print as well as online media, benefiting magazines and newspapers that are hard-pressed to finance long and deep investigations on their own. Look for more signs that the costs of developing those stories will be shared by others as we navigate the crisis in journalism.

Asked about the moribund print media when she appeared on a segment of the popular Morning Joe TV news program, Arianna Huffington said there are “too many autopsies and not enough biopsies.” Her biopsy of investigative journalism shows a lot of healthy tissue, and it’s good to see a bright beam of optimism in this dark time for print media.

RC

The Op-Ed Page of the New York Times (Sunday, May 15th) carries an absolutely blood-freezing contribution by Mark Danner. Danner, author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror, managed to get his hands on a report prepared by the Red Cross after a unit of the humane organization visited Guantánamo late in 2006 to review the prison’s interrogation procedures. Its report was given in strictest secrecy to the CIA.

“A short time ago,” Danner writes, “this document came into my hands and I have set out the stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity.” Tales From Torture’s Dark World is a condensed version of that NYRB article adapted for the Times.

That the barbaric methods used to interrogate the prisoners, authorized at the highest levels of the US government, border on atrocity will be self-evident to anyone who who has a heart (Dick Cheney excepted). But what I wondered as I read it is whether the Red Cross’s report would ever have come to light without the investigative spirit and courage of Danner and the publications that sponsored him. Though abstracts of his report will appear on countless blogs, would any of them have been willing to invest their own resources to initiate the kind of probe he undertook? It’s one thing for bloggers to tread the path blazed by pioneers, but would any of them have the guts to break the story and risk prosecution or harassment?

I don’t think so.

I won’t try to match the eloquence of those who have appealed for humanitarian treatment of combatants and political prisoners. Nor can I judge the guilt or innocence prisoners from whom confessions were extracted by the cruelest forms of coercion. “From everything we know,” Danner writes, “many or all of these men deserve to be tried and punished — to be ‘brought to justice,’ as President Bush vowed they would be.”

No, the reason I’m writing this is to remind you that truth and openness, the pillars on which western civilization rest, depend on newspapers and magazines as well as book publishers such as those publishing these revelations. We also depend on writers like Danner to interpret those revelations and place them in a moral context such as this one:

“The fact that judges, military or civilian, throw out cases of prisoners who have been tortured – and have already done so at Guantánamo – means it is highly unlikely that they will be brought to justice anytime soon.

For the men who have committed great crimes, this seems to mark perhaps the most important and consequential sense in which ‘torture doesn’t work.’ The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed.”

This website has carried many items about the efforts of print publishers to arrest their sickening financial freefall. Some of these ideas are viable and some are not. The issues underlying the rescue of publishers caught up in a devastating paradigm shift are complex and challenging. But we have to find a solution.

Investigative journalism is the lantern we shine on the slimy horrors crawling under the rocks of our society. We must- must – find a way to preserve it.

Richard Curtis