in Tacoma, Wash., and president of the American Society of Newspaper
Editors. This is from his March 27 speech at the ASNE conference, where
Zeeck talked about strenghts newspapers can carry forward as they
“invent a new digital journalism.” The full text is here.
means we’re still the source of most news in this country. We’ll keep
that dominance for a long time. We have the advantage, as Tom
Rosenstiel says, of more boots on the ground. Those boots give us the
advantage of covering important news that no one else covers, and of
presenting a high barrier to market entry for any competitor.
I’m
told the blogosphere is going to eat our lunch. Well, the blogosphere,
for the most part, spends its infinitely expanding gas talking about
what we, newspapers, write, not what some blogger reported. If
newspapers disappeared tomorrow it would be like pulling the fuel rods
from a nuclear reactor: The lights would go out and the blogosphere
wouldn’t produce a single BTU of intellectual heat.
“How many reporters does Yahoo have at City Hall? How many correspondents from Google are risking their lives in Iraq?”It’s
the same with the Internet in general. When someone tells me they get
their news from the Internet, I want to say: “Oh yeah? So, tell me
again, how many reporters does Yahoo have at City Hall? How many
correspondents from Google are risking their lives in Iraq?”
People
working for dot.coms go to jail for stock fraud or backdating options,
not for disclosing important truths and protecting their confidential
source.
News on the Internet –- news from real communities, new
about real governments and real wars –- comes from flesh-and-blood
reporters. And they’re dispatched from our newsrooms, not the soulless
zero-gravity of the Internet.
Another newspaper strength we must
carry into the future is our investigative and enterprise reporting. I
prefer Len Downie and Bob Kaiser’s phrase, “accountability reporting,”
because it recalls our constitutional mandate to hold the powerful to
account. Whatever you call it, newspapers are still the source of
almost all serious accountability reporting in the nation…
free societies can exist without a free press. I believe that’s what
journalism is for. For that reason, my newspaper will fight for open
government and the First Amendment.
I also believe that if we
produce journalism worthy of that First Amendment, and if we hold to
our principles, if we cover our communities with affection but tell the
truth, we can survive this crisis as we’ve survived so many others.
The
challenges we face are great. But the talents, the standards and the
creativity of the people in our newsrooms –- and of America’s editors
-– can surmount any challenge.
