I don’t know John Crewd­son, but I’m sorry he’s out of a job. He’s the sub­ject of this post at the Chicago Reader:

The Nobel Prize in medi­cine was awar­ded last month to Luc Montag­nier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi of the Pas­teur Insti­tute in Paris for dis­cov­er­ing the HIV virus in 1983 — but not to the Amer­ican sci­ent­ist Robert Gallo.

This res­ult might be inter­preted as the ulti­mate vin­dic­a­tion of reporter John Crewd­son, who in 1988, in a 50,000-word story in the Chicago Tribune, argued that Gallo — cred­ited back then with codis­cov­er­ing the virus — had merely redis­covered Montagnier’s virus, which had been sent to Gallo as a pro­fes­sional cour­tesy.

Crewdson’s proof was cir­cum­stan­tial but com­pel­ling, and though I was skep­tical at first of how much the ques­tions he was rais­ing mattered, I came around. Crewdson’s pro­ject, dis­paraged among the Tribune newsroom’s rank and file back then because it kept him out of the paper report­ing for an aston­ish­ing 20 months, is recalled today as a high-water mark from an era when the Tribune was rich, power­ful, and audacious…

But all this is prelude …

On Wed­nes­day the Tribune’s editor, Ger­ould Kern, and asso­ci­ate man­aging editor for national news Joycelyn Win­necke dropped in on the Wash­ing­ton bur­eau and laid Crewd­son off.

I wish the writer had explained why their skep­ti­cism abated. I sup­pose I’m with the news­room. As French gen­eral Fran­cois Can­robert observed, on wit­ness­ing the dis­astrous charge of the Light Bri­gade at Bal­ak­lava, “C’est mag­ni­fique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.”

The com­ments on the post are pen­et­rat­ing. Here’s Ex-Journo:

I think the ele­phant in the room is the concept of hav­ing a reporter spend 20 months and 50K words to doc­u­ment whether Sci­ent­ist A or Sci­ent­ist B truly deserved credit. I sub­mit it is that kind of think­ing that is a big part of why news­pa­pers are in the trouble they’re in today. News­rooms pur­sue “good stor­ies” without think­ing through exactly why it is, or isn’t, a “good” story.

Is it an inter­est­ing yarn? I guess. Is it worth put­ting in the paper? Sure, all things being equal. But things are never equal. Everything comes with oppor­tun­ity costs. What stor­ies and issues were not covered by Crewd­son (or the Tribune) because of the resources com­mit­ted to the Gallo story?

Keep in mind, this was not Randy Shilts-type report­ing that brought an import­ant pub­lic health issue to light and saved lives. It is cov­er­age of an aca­demic piss­ing match. Which most of the pub­lic couldn’t care less about. And which (sac­ri­lege alert!) isn’t par­tic­u­larly neces­sary or use­ful inform­a­tion needed to facil­it­ate the func­tion­ing of a demo­cratic soci­ety. That is the reason we care about the sur­vival of news­pa­pers, isn’t it?

And another com­menter, Hal­let, bangs in the nail:

I’d like to also affirm what Ex-Journo said about the oppor­tun­ity cost of hav­ing a highly com­pensated journ­al­ist spend months on a, pos­sibly, mildly inter­est­ing but mar­ginal story.

This is true of so much in print journ­al­ism. Stor­ies are covered because they eat up space and get you out of the busi­ness of doing some­thing use­ful. Crewdson’s Gallo hey­day came not all that long after Chicago news­pa­pers aban­doned the idea of doing any kind of under­cover journ­al­ism, like the Mirage series in the Sun-Times.

Sud­denly, they got reli­gion and decided that such work (often the only way to really nail so many sor­did under­sides of gov­ern­ment and soci­ety) was some­how uneth­ical. It’s so much cheaper and so much less messy to send someone like John Crewd­son after some high-minded but truly mar­ginal story.

And, again, the idea is to eat up space with some­thing that LOOKS damned import­ant — and some­thing that, incid­ent­ally, is inclined to win plaudits in the her­met­ic­ally sealed journ­al­ism awards industry. The read­ers can’t tell what’s miss­ing. It’s like try­ing to prove a negative.

So IMHO one can trace the long, sad down­ward arc of Amer­ican news­pa­per journ­al­ism from Mirage to Gallo. News­pa­pers aren’t dying; they are killing them­selves, shoot­ing them­selves repeatedly in their fully anes­thet­ized heads…

If papers had much to say, they’d really pack it into those dimin­ish­ing columns. Instead we get clip art and eye candy.