The Future of News: Hard Times Shake a First Amendment Bulwark

November 3, 2009
by Corydon Ireland, Harvard News Office

The future of news? There might not be one.

Or if there is, newsgathering might require taking steps that go against the grain of newsroom ethics and tradition, with armies of untrained citizen journalists, for instance, or government funding that sets up a conflict of interest.

The question of the future of American news — and by extension the fate of the First Amendment — was the overriding concern this week (Nov. 2) for a panel of experts at the Harvard Kennedy School. The co-sponsors were the Institute of Politics and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

It was an impressive gathering. Three of the five panelists have won Pulitzer Prizes; the other two are or were Harvard fellows. Three represented the traditional print world, one television news, and the other dot-com journalism.

The hour-long event at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum acknowledged both the despair and the hope that journalists feel over the present state of the American news business, rocked by economic turmoil and the rise of the Internet.

Moderator Tom Fiedler, a onetime Shorenstein Fellow (2007) and Visiting Edward R. Murrow Lecturer at Harvard (2008), opened with a lament: “It is difficult not to feel like we’ve come here to sit in mourning for something that we’ve loved for many years.”

In the last week alone, he said, came a wave of grim announcements: Forbes is cutting a quarter of its staff; The New York Times by year’s end will ax nearly a 10th of its newsroom staff; The Wall Street Journal is eliminating its story-rich Boston bureau; and Time Inc. announced 540 layoffs. In addition, Gourmet magazine folded.

Meanwhile, Business Week was recently sold off “like some broken-down horse,” said Fiedler, now dean of the College of Communication at Boston University.

But toward the end of session, panelist Alex Jones held his arms out to stop the freight train of bad news, declaring that online journalism “can be extraordinarily powerful,” and is capable of “breathtaking” news stories.

Read the full story at the Harvard Gazette.

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Future of the News panel
Photo credit Jon Chase/Harvard News Office.