Great point, Dave - it has the potential to revitalize academia and journalism all in one fell swoop.
Josh Young
· 9 months ago
I think Hersh should find 1000 people willing to pay $1000 year--not for his writing, which he should publish freely, but for membership in a club. It would be the Hersh Club, whose members could ask him questions and discuss his reporting with him.
This idea isn't new. Benefactors of a museum sometimes get special access to the art in after-hours tours given by the curator. They get to have a glass of wine and ask special questions as their whims dictate. Members of the Hersh Club might enjoy the same. Maybe there could be something like a private listserv or a friendfeed room. Maybe there would be occasional meetups around the country.
Now, he couldn't share all of his reporting, since it's often secret and a group of 1000 people is too big to trust fully. But he could share a lot of it and answer follow-up questions. He could also release some essay just to the members. Some of them would pass it on to friends, but that might be okay much of the time. They would just be paying to hear the word sooner.
Hersh could also turn around and ask for help. His members would be there to support him, after all. I'd bet that more than a few would be honored. After a while, members of the club would develop their own community. They'd talk back and forth. They'd tease out problems and conceive of solutions. They'd have great questions, tips, and leads.
Of course, 1000 x 1000 is a lot of money. Maybe Hersh wouldn't be that popular, or maybe 1000 people is too many for a community of this kind. But he might be able to find 250 people willing to pay even more. The market would work it out--but only if there were sufficient transparency. Members of his club would have to disclose their identities, so he could avoid those who might cause the rest of us to question the integrity of his work.
interstar
· 9 months ago
I wonder if anyone has the figures for how much Sy Hersh costs. Is he paid by the story? Is he on a retainer? Does he get an advance when he pitches a story.
The other question we should be asking is this. Clearly an investigative reporter needs a whole network of contacts and people he can turn to for quotes, opinions. How does that get managed in a post-newspaper world? To what extent do people talk to him because they hope for some return from the media he's associated with? Could you create that network from an academic base?
Fascinating question ...
dave
· 9 months ago
Here's the network we created at Berkman from an academic base.
If he had a web person to manage the net presence you could build something great.
interstar
· 9 months ago
yes. good point
boblq
· 9 months ago
The key problem is economic. as you note: How do we pay for the work he does.
Rather than the universities, highly dependent upon government grants and other subsidies, perhaps what we need are Non-profit Journalists Organizations, NJOs, that take over this work. Funded by tax-deductible donations and beholden only to their subscribers.
Not perfect perhaps, but what in this world is?
BobLQ
Allen Holub
· 9 months ago
I certainly understand the "paying" part. If nobody will pay for online content and if there are no more print magazines, then how does Mr. Hersh survive? The real issue, I think, is not Sy Hersh, who's prominent enough that he could probably make his living by blogging, selling content for download to the Kindle, or some other means. However, how could a 22-year-old just-getting-started Sy Hersh survive until he got his reputation? How could someone get a large enough advance to support him/herself while researching an article? Accademia doesn't really cut it in this department. First, there are way too few jobs. Secondly, the requirements of the job (a PhD) have nothing to do with actually doing journalism --- how many investigative reporters want or need PhDs? Third, you're expected to teach, which is not a bad thing, but I imagine that many investigative reporters would make lousy teachers, and more to the point, they want to spend their time investigating, not putting together lesson plans.
Saying that academia should pay for journalism is like treating the military as a jobs program. Not everyone who needs a job wants to go out and kill people.
I wish I had something positive to suggest as an alternative, but I don't.
dave
· 9 months ago
Is working in academia really like joining the military and killing people?? :-)
And of course I meant Sy Hersh to represent a class of people -- an outstanding example.
I guess I hoped people would draw another conclusion, that academia has a similar mission to journalism and that it could host the kinds of investigations people want to keep going even after the publications cease publishing.
rogerben
· 9 months ago
Dave: I dunno if I agree about academia being a good fit, but it *is* a very interesting idea. Thanks for the notion to chew upon.
anonontheashram
· 9 months ago
Dave, Eneterprise reporting techniques is taught at the underegrad level. but most often it's a learned on the job skill, that's passed on from a senior reporter or group of reporters to junior level GA's (general assignment repiorters) as they progress through an organization. It's a great skill set and it requires diligence and an open mind.
good post, David. best JimF
John Feld
· 9 months ago
It would truely be a good world if our academics were to do this on a regular basis. And there are indeed some who manage to be progressive investigators and make a living from universities. But, at least here in the USA, I think our colleges would want to make money from such endeavors, rather than to have this be given away freely. Noam Chomsky is one of the few that really make a difference outside of their specialized areas (psycholinguistics) and still gets paid by their institution. I am sure there are many more. Can the system accommodate the few dozen Hersh-like journalists that I for one would like to keep? And what of the Maureen Dowd's of the world? I do hope these people find good ways of continuing their work as the traditional media crumbles around our ears.
John
· 9 months ago
I don't even think that getting paid is the problem.... I would *gladly* pay for an internet site with what I perceive as *real* *actual* reporting, a site that raises the standard of discourse in the world. "My great news site":
* would have an opinion poll of 3000 professors of economics on where the economy is going every second week and offer their data as part of my subscription and of course they would have a whole site explaining CDOs and CDS papers, *I* wouldn't have had to wait for NPR's This American Life to get a real sense of what's happening
* would have dived into President Obama's budget on day one and given me statistics on what's actually different (not scream about socialism),
* during Katrina they would have posted a guy with a camera on every military checkpoint,
* after Virginia Tech they would have tracked every "ban computer-games legislation",
* wouldn't contain *any* of the feel-good, easy-to-write, mum-with-8-children-welfare-or-not copytext *crap* that fills every news site that is out there, because I can get that ad-supported on e!online. If it isn't fact-checked, sourced reporting it's not on the site.
I suspect the reason that this doesn't exist is, that actual, real reporting requires you to quickly learn almost everything you can about a field so you can actually talk intelligently about what happens, as it happens. Now everyone will tell me that that just isn't possible, but *make* it possible and I'll pay 3000 Dollars a year for a premium subscription that includes your source material.
It would even work offline. Well-researched data on problems ranging from "does teacher tenure result in higher or lower test scores", "does X cause cancer", "is clean coal real", "how much did the Iraq war cost" can sell on paper, at least imho.
The main problem I see with that business model: it won't make anyone a star reporter, no one will know your name.
Is that news or agenda validation? I don't think I would pay much for very long to have my personal agenda validated.
arthur goodfriend
· 9 months ago
Imagine an authoritatively sourced, eight thousand word investigative piece pitched by a tenured faculty member of Yale's Graduate School of Anthropology, on the topic of—to remain congruent with her domain of expertise—Skull and Bones. Who could possibly object ? No one, except perhaps a brace of former presidents, an hypothesis the Yale Endowment might well factor into its august deliberations. Very good, one might say, given such a case Yale would simply defer to Harvard to subsidize the investment, forgetting that Mrs Graham could have said to Ben Bradlee, 'The New York Times and Los Angeles Times don't have to entertain in this town. I do.' Or that Punch Sulzberger might have said to Neil Sheehan, 'This a leaked, classified Defense Department document, Ellsberg is an unstable malcontent who's probably commited a half dozen felonies to procure this material, tell him to shop it to I.F. Stone.' Or that William Shawn might have said to John Hersey, 'You're asking for 30,000 words in a single issue ? But that would be the entire magazine !' Journalism of the caliber practiced by Seymour Hersh, regardless of whether or not it is valued at any given time in America's fairweather society, remains a priceless commodity, one that is essentially not for sale, and which still enjoys protection under the United States Constitution. But Hirsh's collaboration with the New Yorker Magazine these last few years (pace Tina Brown) has served us well in other ways, too, reminding us that competently executed reporting is not only still possible, but that certain editors at certain publications remain, and still today, willing to take existential risks to support the work of outstanding journalists, all in pursuit of nothing more than what Dave terms the truth and the privilege of publishing on another day. As much as it pains me to say, I am not sure that the tenured faculty of Yale would display the same courage.
and... Columbia: http://tinyurl.com/46x7l2 The School’s investigative journalism faculty includes: * Walt Bogdanich, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter of The New York Times; * Wayne Barrett, investigative reporter and senior editor of the Village Voice; * Robert Port,investigative editor of the Albany Times-Union; * Tom Torok, chief database editor of The New York Times; and * Jim Mintz, a leading private investigator in New York and head of the MintzGroup.
All Comments
This idea isn't new. Benefactors of a museum sometimes get special access to the art in after-hours tours given by the curator. They get to have a glass of wine and ask special questions as their whims dictate. Members of the Hersh Club might enjoy the same. Maybe there could be something like a private listserv or a friendfeed room. Maybe there would be occasional meetups around the country.
Now, he couldn't share all of his reporting, since it's often secret and a group of 1000 people is too big to trust fully. But he could share a lot of it and answer follow-up questions. He could also release some essay just to the members. Some of them would pass it on to friends, but that might be okay much of the time. They would just be paying to hear the word sooner.
Hersh could also turn around and ask for help. His members would be there to support him, after all. I'd bet that more than a few would be honored. After a while, members of the club would develop their own community. They'd talk back and forth. They'd tease out problems and conceive of solutions. They'd have great questions, tips, and leads.
Of course, 1000 x 1000 is a lot of money. Maybe Hersh wouldn't be that popular, or maybe 1000 people is too many for a community of this kind. But he might be able to find 250 people willing to pay even more. The market would work it out--but only if there were sufficient transparency. Members of his club would have to disclose their identities, so he could avoid those who might cause the rest of us to question the integrity of his work.
The other question we should be asking is this. Clearly an investigative reporter needs a whole network of contacts and people he can turn to for quotes, opinions. How does that get managed in a post-newspaper world? To what extent do people talk to him because they hope for some return from the media he's associated with? Could you create that network from an academic base?
Fascinating question ...
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/
If he had a web person to manage the net presence you could build something
great.
Rather than the universities, highly dependent upon government grants and other subsidies, perhaps what we need are Non-profit Journalists Organizations, NJOs, that take over this work. Funded by tax-deductible donations and beholden only to their subscribers.
Not perfect perhaps, but what in this world is?
BobLQ
Saying that academia should pay for journalism is like treating the military as a jobs program. Not everyone who needs a job wants to go out and kill people.
I wish I had something positive to suggest as an alternative, but I don't.
:-)
And of course I meant Sy Hersh to represent a class of people -- an
outstanding example.
I guess I hoped people would draw another conclusion, that academia has a
similar mission to journalism and that it could host the kinds of
investigations people want to keep going even after the publications cease
publishing.
Eneterprise reporting techniques is taught at the underegrad level. but most often it's a learned on the job skill, that's passed on from a senior reporter or group of reporters to junior level GA's (general assignment repiorters) as they progress through an organization.
It's a great skill set and it requires diligence and an open mind.
good post, David.
best
JimF
Noam Chomsky is one of the few that really make a difference outside of their specialized areas (psycholinguistics) and still gets paid by their institution. I am sure there are many more.
Can the system accommodate the few dozen Hersh-like journalists that I for one would like to keep?
And what of the Maureen Dowd's of the world?
I do hope these people find good ways of continuing their work as the traditional media crumbles around our ears.
* would have an opinion poll of 3000 professors of economics on where the economy is going every second week and offer their data as part of my subscription and of course they would have a whole site explaining CDOs and CDS papers, *I* wouldn't have had to wait for NPR's This American Life to get a real sense of what's happening
* would have dived into President Obama's budget on day one and given me statistics on what's actually different (not scream about socialism),
* during Katrina they would have posted a guy with a camera on every military checkpoint,
* after Virginia Tech they would have tracked every "ban computer-games legislation",
* wouldn't contain *any* of the feel-good, easy-to-write, mum-with-8-children-welfare-or-not copytext *crap* that fills every news site that is out there, because I can get that ad-supported on e!online. If it isn't fact-checked, sourced reporting it's not on the site.
I suspect the reason that this doesn't exist is, that actual, real reporting requires you to quickly learn almost everything you can about a field so you can actually talk intelligently about what happens, as it happens. Now everyone will tell me that that just isn't possible, but *make* it possible and I'll pay 3000 Dollars a year for a premium subscription that includes your source material.
It would even work offline. Well-researched data on problems ranging from "does teacher tenure result in higher or lower test scores", "does X cause cancer", "is clean coal real", "how much did the Iraq war cost" can sell on paper, at least imho.
The main problem I see with that business model: it won't make anyone a star reporter, no one will know your name.
Its front-page would, of course, look a lot like this: http://www.scripting.com/futureNews.html
</rant>
I don't think I would pay much for very long to have my personal agenda validated.
(http://www.ire.org/extraextra/)
IRE is housed at the U of Missouri; see this about investigative reporting by its faculty and students:
http://tinyurl.com/ammvfe
Berkeley: http://journalism.berkeley.edu/program/investig...
and...
http://www.centerforinvestigativereporting.org/
and...
Columbia: http://tinyurl.com/46x7l2
The School’s investigative journalism faculty includes:
* Walt Bogdanich, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter of The New York Times;
* Wayne Barrett, investigative reporter and senior editor of the Village Voice;
* Robert Port,investigative editor of the Albany Times-Union;
* Tom Torok, chief database editor of The New York Times; and
* Jim Mintz, a leading private investigator in New York and head of the MintzGroup.
http://www.minnpost.com/ericblackblog/2009/03/1...