It hasn't been that way across the industry for a long time now. These days, the newsrooms are so poorly-staffed that every person who goes out the door is responsible for turning “something.” If you want to go to that school board meeting, you have to guarantee that something will come out of it. In fact, you often have to know what's going to happen in the meeting and sell that angle prior to going.

In other words, the very speculative due diligence that you're talking about has been dead for quite some time.

Stories like this one, whether involving municipalities or school boards, most often come to light when an insider tips off the reporter. That's still going to happen, but now more and more of the people who used to just make those tip calls to the newsroom may end up posting it on their own sites first.

It's been decades since journalism did things “right.” Real news happens slow.

Thanks for pushing the conversation!

My point is just that a lot of the boring but important work newspapers especially do, simply won't be covered at all, even by amateurs, for the most part. And that's where corruption sneaks in. When I was a reporter, I probably attended hundreds, if not thousands of council meetings. Rarely if ever was there a blogger or anyone else attending, to report on the events, because they were largely dull. But if I never came, who knows what the councilors would try and pull? Take a look at that town in California, Bell City, where a lot of the public officials and city workers gave themselves six-figure raises. And the outrage and news didn't spread until the LA Times did a story. Not sure if any amateur covered the story at all, but the public at large didn't know about it until the LA Times did a story. I fully embrace amateurs, I'm just afraid they won't be there, in many cases.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/08/bell-robert-rizzo-compensation-million.html

Also check out TBD.com in the DC area.

(Have you noticed that Embedded Journalists and Corporate Storytelling are two of my favorite themes?)

We don't have to like it, but ducking our heads under the dashboard and pretending we're not on this road isn't a solution.

What is the solution? We — as individuals and as organizations — have to step up and tell our stories. Technology empowers us and dares us at the same time.

I also loved your point about curation vs. creation. In fact, there's a news organization here in the Twin Cities that has embraced this model: BringMeTheNews. Check it out–pretty ahead-of-the-curve-type stuff.

@arikhanson

I used to think that too, and I agree that the quality and objectivity will certainly be compromised. However, the idea that Tomorrow's Editor will link to the narratives and accounts of interested amateurs (bloggers) is just another step down the road we've been on for three decades.

How much of what appears in newspapers and in broadcast is driven by news releases? Editors (through the declining revenues and penny-pinching ownership) have been ceding control of the content creation piece for a while now. Twenty years ago, a network news division would rather go without a story than use “b-roll” from a tainted flack for the PR department. Now, the networks will run cell phone video taken by a punk kids who was in the right place at the right time.

Look at this piece from Good Morning America in March. The producers of that newscast are already allowing amateurs and outside parties to join in the creation — they are accepting the role of curator and providing context.

You're going to see this enter into the print realms, too. Reporters who start citing bloggers who are known quantities, and who have developed reputations for their own ethics, conduct and accuracy. Eventually, editors may lean on them to link away, adding their own historical context (or even a debunking, if that is needed.)

We didn't just arrive at this cliff overnight. We're just become so accustomed to the slope, we forgot we were angling down.

I read your post with interest, given that I spent 10 years in journalism myself, at three daily newspapers.

The one thing I struggle with is this statement:
“The role of the editor in the future will have less to do with with tweaking the content of your staff, and more to do with finding, discerning, and linking to material produced elsewhere.”

In most American communities, if the one reporter doesn't show up to the school board meeting, no other news outlet will. There's going to be no “linking” to other sources. That news will simply disappear. On the International/National/Regional and even the state fronts, I think you're right on. But my struggle is with the many stories that are and will get dropped, simply because the one reporter from the one paper quit attending the meetings due to cut backs etc., or the paper decided Kim Kardashian supposedly being spotted at a gas station just off the local Interstate is trending better online, so that has to be the story the reporter focuses on. Journalism's future is murky indeed (Not necessarily bad, but certainly unclear.)