CAN JOURNALISM SURVIVE SYNERGY?

By: Nat Hentoff Nat Hentoff: Do Multimedia Journalists Have Time To Think?



A.J. Liebling, The New Yorker's nonpareil press critic from 1946
to 1963, told of when, as a very young newspaperman on the sports desk,
he'd see a veteran reporter, coming in from a football game. Before
sitting down at his typewriter, the reporter would ask for some quiet,
'so he could hear himself think.'



Said Liebling: 'The warning was not lost on me.'



Reading the March 26 Newsday story on the Chicago-based Tribune
Co.'s brave, breakneck, new world of multimedia synergy, the warning
came to me as clearly as Louis Armstrong playing 'Back o' Town Blues.'



The lead of Charles Zehren's story focused on veteran reporter Bill
Barnhart: 'He steps on the 24-by-26 'stage' that dominates the paper's
massive fourth-floor newsroom ... stares deep into the lens of a
television camera and becomes multimedia man.'



Barnhart 'later files a story that's carried in the next day's
newspaper and on the paper's Web site.' He may also be heard on
Tribune's WGN radio station.



According to Tom Garritano, the Chicago Tribune's manager of
intergroup operations, this polymath journalism is now 'part of the
job.' No print reporter is forced to multiply himself, but,
Newsday reports, 'their participation can be, and is, noted
positively on job evaluations.' And maybe for promotions and
assignments.



If my job were to depend on becoming part of this racetrack journalism,
I would turn in my press card and go back to writing novels and books
on how to preserve the Bill of Rights, and why.



I am not intimidated by the techniques of being a multimedia reporter.
I started in journalism doing news, sports, political campaigns, and
jazz on Boston radio station WMEX. In New York, I free-lanced for
various newspapers and magazines while having my own program on WNBC-TV
and a radio series on WBAI-FM. Now, while writing regularly for various
print operations, including The Village Voice and The Wall
Street Journal, I'm often on national radio and TV.



But in all of this far-flung journalism, I am always a reporter first,
and my commentary is based on that foundation of all journalism. For
the Voice, I often do breaking stories, requiring a continuing
momentum - an unpredictable length of time to get the story right. If I
had to postpone a crucial interview with a reluctant source to bring a
story up-to-date on radio, TV, or the Web - or all of them - I wouldn't
do it, and that would be noted in my 'job evaluation.'



Furthermore, invoking the warning that descended on A.J. Liebling, when
would I have time to think? Does this source have a hidden agenda?
Where can I go to check these figures? It's like the tree of telephone
calls, with its ever-extending branches, in the movie version of 'All
the President's Men.'



I'm aware that there will continue to be long-range, investigative
reports, often by teams of reporters, such as the superb Chicago
Tribune series last November, 'The Failure of the Death Penalty in
Illinois,' by Ken Armstrong and Steve Mills. That basic journalism
convinced Illinois Gov. George Ryan, a death-penalty supporter, to
declare a moratorium on executions in that state. Their reporting has
had a continuing effect on death-penalty debates in other cities and
states - and in Congress.



But how many of these time-consuming, expensive assignments will
survive in newspapers whirled along in the multimedia 24-hour-news
typhoon? On National Public Radio's March 28 'Talk of the Nation,' Leo
Wolinsky, executive editor at the Los Angeles Times (now
consumed by the Tribune Co.), said of the costs of these Cecil B.
DeMillelike news operations: 'If we have to crank up the margins, we
don't know what will have to go.'



As with the genie who escaped from the bottle, there is no stopping the
omnivorous force of synergy in journalism. My hope is that some
newspaper publishers and editors will stop and think and let at least
some reporters have time to get their stories right.



It is no secret - and should be a source of shame in the news business
- that foreign reporting has fallen off, except, mostly, for what Adlai
Stevenson called 'crisis journalism': floods, earthquakes, ethnic
cleansing of whites.



So, for the first time, to my knowledge, Human Rights Quarterly,
a journal with a circulation of 2,200, published by Johns Hopkins
University, broke a stunning story in its May 1999 issue: 'The Rape of
Dinah: Human Rights, Civil War in Liberia, and Evil Triumphant.' In it,
Kenneth Cain tells, in very specific details, of epidemic atrocities -
torture, murders, cannibalism, and an estimated 50,000 rapes -
uninvestigated and unprosecuted in Liberia.



While reporting it, Cain was unavailable for radio, TV, or Web updates.