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.