Spencer Ackerman, who reports on national security issues for The Washington Independent and blogs about the same—and does both at a consistently high level of quality, which is not a simple task—last year posted an item on his blog, Attackerman, explaining how to deconstruct a typical piece by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker.
He said Hersh was ill-served by the conventional journalistic habit of
shaping reporting into stories that needed to signify their importance.
Lots of Hersh’s reporting, Ackerman argued, would be better understood
as pure reporting and read simply because it was what Hersh had learned,
whatever it portended. Shaping it into traditional journalism
structures warped it.

One day, journalistic convention will decide that placing
reporters like Hersh within the box of a lede (the intentional
misspelling of “lead” is yet another journalistic convention that makes
little sense) for a piece that needs no lede is a silly idea.
Then, my friends, we will finally have the free play of notebook
material. But until then, we have to read Hersh with a bit of a knowing
eye. You can hate all you like, but god’s son is across the belly and
he’ll prove you lost already. [Parenthesis mine, italics and
capitalization his.]

I have no idea what that last sentence about God’s son and the belly
means, but it’s a blog post so I don’t have to understand it and
Ackerman doesn’t have to care that I don’t. This is part of the nature
of blogging. The writer can assume I know exactly what he means, or not
care that I don’t. Somebody else will get it. This kind of writing is
directed at a very particular, almost personal, audience. It’s like
writing in dialect and as far from a mass medium as you can get. While
it happens to be available via the Internet to millions of people, it is
certainly not aimed at them.

What Ackerman is advocating is that Hersh be liberated from the
formal conventions of journalism, and the constraints that accompany
them. Then he can simply say, “Here, look what I found.” Ackerman is
asking, implicitly, that Hersh be regarded as a blogger. I think he’s
right. I think blogging would suit Hersh. I also think blogging is
saving journalism.

I worked at newspapers for thirty years and loved every day of it.
Wait. It’s more complicated than that. Much more. In fact, to say I
loved newspapering wholeheartedly is a bald-faced lie. I hated at least
half of those three decades worth of days and swore at the end of many
that it would be the last. I carried out these vows to quit several
times, never for very promising prospects. I left to write speeches, to
write fiction, to pound nails—none of which was I as good at as pounding
a beat. So what was I fighting for or against? Sometimes, those who
knew me would suggest that it was nothing more than myself. Sometimes,
though, I actually had a point.

I hated the conventions that bound daily journalism, the stilted, odd
language in which it was written as well as the contrived structures
into which that odd language was shaped. The common newspaper style is
so heavily codified you need a Berlitz course to interpret it. More than
formal, the style is abstract and artificial. I once (on the very first
day at a new job) got into a frighteningly intense argument with a city
editor who had objected to my use of the word “slumbered” to describe
the behavior of two political candidates during a debate. They didn’t
really sleep through it, did they? he asked. Of course not, I said. I
meant it figuratively, not literally. We don’t use figurative language
here, he told me. Then he changed the word to “lumbered.”

That was one benighted guy, but the problem was nearly universal.
Until recently, you couldn’t escape it. Now you can. The advent of the
Web and the proliferation of smart, aggressive bloggers around the globe
have torn journalism loose from its hinges. The hounds have been
unleashed.

While disliking it intensely, it is easy to forget there was a reason
for the soporific style of newspaper writing. Newspapers were actually
trying to do something good. They recognized that they held powerful,
uncontested positions as conveyors of news to their communities. After
much coaxing, they took it upon themselves to shed their partisan pasts
and don a cloak of social responsibility—a practice that they called
objectivity. They did it in part to sell papers—they thought if they
made fewer people angry they would have more readers—but mainly they did
it because they thought it was the right thing to do.

I never worked in a newsroom where these responsibilities were
seriously questioned. I also never worked in one where they were
seriously honored. I don’t mean that people didn’t think they were being
honored. And they were, but only in the most formulaic way imaginable. A
balanced story about a political debate, for example, would carefully
include the points of view on both sides of whatever issue was being
examined. Never mind that there might actually be three-dozen points of
view, not two. The bigger problem was that this removed the newspaper
from its function as a seeker of truth. That’s not our job, we said.
Instead, we wrote what we were told.

The net result was that even the best newspapers became predictable
and stultifying. Color and flourish in the writing were banished.
Curiosity was discouraged. At one job, there was a respected senior
reporter who routinely wrote his stories before doing much if any
reporting. Then he would go out to find people to tell him what he had
already written. He was an extreme case—almost literally filling in the
blanks—but hardly alone. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been
asked what a particular story would say before I had done a lick of
reporting on it.

Stories were edited with the idea that every reader was going to read
every word and therefore the words and, more damagingly, the ideas had
to be of a certain simplicity. This is such a crackpot notion it barely
seems fair to critique it. No one reads the entire paper; few read most
of it.

The point is that newspapers have been killing themselves slowly for a
long time. So long as the monopoly profits rolled in, the death by a
thousand cuts wasn’t paid any attention. When the Internet arrived to
eliminate the advertising monopolies, the newspapers already had a foot
in the grave.

That said, it wouldn’t hurt the Web triumphalists to acknowledge that
there is something more than jobs being lost in the process of
newspapers dying. Whether you liked the way they did it or not, monopoly
newspapers often performed civic functions.

The real power of a big paper is most apparent in a couple of
specific circumstances. The first is when something really big happens,
usually a disaster, causing huge portions of the paper’s resources to be
thrown at the story. This is a sort of a reserve power, there when you
need it but invisible when you don’t. I often was assigned to rewrite on
these stories. It was a frustrating, exhilarating job. I could sit at
my desk for the whole day, watching the inanity of cable news and
waiting for reporters in the field to file. Then, as deadline for the
day’s first edition approached, I would suddenly be overwhelmed with
more great reporting than I could possibly use. Reporters I’d never
heard of were giving me incredible stuff.

The second circumstance is when breathtaking stories you knew nothing
about, but that people had been working on for months or years,
suddenly appear in the paper. The depth of the newspaper’s staff allows
for this relative luxury.

These two quite different kinds of reporting power are both
threatened as newspapers decline. Because of their irregular, episodic
nature, readers will not necessarily know they are gone, but their
absence will make a community’s news culture considerably poorer.

I once gave a talk to a group of business executives about coverage
of 9/11. My assignment back then was to profile the hijackers. My
editor’s instructions were to go wherever I needed to go and stay as
long as I needed to stay. Neither of us imagined the reporting would
take three years and require travel to twenty countries on four
continents. But it did. In the middle of my talk one of the executives
interrupted. “This is fascinating,” he said, “but I can’t help asking:
How does it cost out?” It doesn’t, of course. There isn’t much a
newspaper does that pays for itself. I suppose you could think about
this sort of reporting as brand management, reminding your readers
you’re a serious organization. But without the subsidy of the monopoly
profits, there will be less and less of this kind of coverage, if any at
all.

Ours is a newspaper family. My wife and I met in a newsroom. She takes her BlackBerry to bed so she can read the next day’s New York Times
the night before. We have three papers delivered every morning. I read
them in thirty minutes, thirty-five if there are box scores to
scrutinize. Clearly, there’s much more looking than reading going on.

Which isn’t to say I don’t read. I read a lot, but selectively. When
I’m working on an extended reporting project, I tend to read exclusively
on that subject. This does not a well-rounded person make. Or a
well-rounded news consumer. In truth, though, I’ve never much liked
reading news, even when I was reporting it. I’ve written a couple, but
haven’t read a murder story in years, or a campaign-trail dispatch in
many more. I’m a big sports fan but almost never read newspaper sports
stories. Here’s why:

Cliff Lee looked like Neo on top of the building at the end
of the Matrix. Like the game slowed down just for him and he could see
everything in ten different ways while the Yankees were stuck in their
little three dimension [sic] world.

This was Craig Calcaterra, a lawyer with too much time on his hands,
blogging on The Hardball Times about the first game of last year’s World
Series. This is almost the perfect beginning for a blog post. It
assumed you knew what had happened. It cast its subject into pop culture
and it was dead-on smart. Compare it to any newspaper game story and
tell me which you would rather read. Yeah, me too.

Even when I still worked for a newspaper, I was already spending more
time reading things that were connected to the news, driven by it, but
that weren’t newspapers. This has only been exacerbated since I left the
newsroom. I used to argue that newspapers ought to return to their
mass-medium roots—the high-voltage days of the penny press. That now
seems silly. Newspapers have a product that is mismatched to their
audience, but becoming more of a mass medium is no longer possible.
There is increasingly no mass to be mediated. Everything’s been blown
apart. It’s as if somebody set off a bomb in a crystal museum; there are
shards of audience scattered from here to kingdom come.

The shards, though, are empowered to reassemble outside the museum. I
and thousands of others have built our own newspapers out of rss feeds.
I subscribe to about a hundred different Web sites and have organized
them in Google Reader. The material is automatically fed into a system
of folders that I designate. Think of the folders as newspaper sections.
My A section is science news. My B section is sports, baseball and
professional basketball only. The C section is politics. D is books and
movies.

After I spend my half hour reading the three newspapers, I spend a
solid two hours reading through my subscription list. It’s customizable,
specific, highly organized, idiosyncratic, and immediate. How can a
newspaper compete with that?