Why aren’t reporters asking to see Reagan’s presidential papers? In what businesses are people working much harder than they did five years ago? Are the Bush administration’s policies fueling or stemming the wildfires?
A new site, NiemanWatchdog.org, highlights these and other “questions not yet asked about today’s news,” with the goal of encouraging more informed reporting.
The site is the latest activity of the Nieman Watchdog Project, which was created in 1996 by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Before launching the website, the Project held conferences and commissioned articles “designed to invigorate the media’s role in monitoring the activities of organizations and leaders in government and in other positions of power over people’s lives.”
You can read the articles and conference summaries here.
The new site is designed to take this mission one step further, by seeking out experts from academia, the business world, and government to suggest questions and provide background on topics in the news.
The questions range from the obvious to the probing. Most of the questions, it should be noted, are posed by “experts” with clear points of view, and the answers they offer are their own opinions. Still, some are thought-provoking and hopefully will prod the media to dig deeper.
“Great questions are a key to great journalism,” writes Barry Sussman, the editor of the Nieman Watchdog Project and former Washington Post editor. “But often, in the press of deadlines, the flood of raw information, manipulated news, deliberate misinformation and just plain junk, great questions are hard to develop. Reporters and editors need to know what’s happening, why it happened, who’s involved, who’s affected, and what happens next.”
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