The future of investigative journalism? Books, according to ex-WSJ Managing Editor Norman Pearlstine.
Pearlstine doesn’t believe the newspaper business model will support the kind of long-form, investigative journalism that many of the top reporters and editors have spent their careers pursuing.
Case in point: the Washington Post’s recent 17,000-word, four-part series on IED’s in Iraq. Great story, Norm said, but probably better positioned as a book, or a premium download for Amazon’s Kindle.
“There might be 50,000 people in the world who want to read that story, but not the ones advertisers want to reach,” he said.
2 responses to “The future of investigative journalism…”
Books are back. I am sure that there are more non-fiction journalism books published (and perhaps read? does anyone have the figures?) than ever before. Costs have fallen and literacy has increased. I also suspect that people are increasingly using newspapers as a leisure or commuter read. So we get our in-depth analysis from books like Steve Coll’s brilliant “The Bin-Ladens”. It is journalistic but you wouldn’t want it in your morning paper…
agreed
far more insight into Iraq in Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” than all the media coverage I have consumed.
A travesty that the Paul Greengrass movie adaptation won’t be released until after the US presidential election