The challenge of teaching business journalism

I first posted this to my
I first posted this to my blog, and David Akin left a comment there.
I’m reproducing it here (without his consent; it’s 2 a.m.; he can send me an angry email in the morning if he wants 🙂 ) to widen any potential debate:
[Comment was cross-posted to Blue Plate Special]

“I write; I publish. And that used to be the end of it. Now, I write, I publish and a community of people who have special knowledge or who are deeply interested in the topic amplify, correct, modify, or extend the reportage. For a beat reporter, this is fabulous, because I now have more knowledge about my beat . . .”
This is something I wrote back in 2005 in response to a question from Jay. Jay hadn’t asked me specifically about Canadian newspapers and their blogging ways (he was interested in how blogging was affecting the output of mainline journalists) but, as I’m a Canadian, who, after spending a decade as a print reporter, now reports for nightly network news, I thought I’d respond to this post by relying on that reply to Jay …
One suggested corrective to what seem to be many of the assumptions here: Blogging — be it in the U.S. or Canada — is not the highest form of evolution for journalists employed by newspapers. It may be for certain types of journalists but it probably isn’t for most. Many commentators — academics often but bloggers mostly — believe that because mainstream news organizations do not blog, then that must mean they are the failures; that they are the dinosaurs headed for extinction. Not true. Mainstream newspapers trying to avoid distinction might want to take a cue from the very print-oriented changes at the Globe and Mail. For all The Toronto Star’s well-earned accolades as a new media and blogging leader, those accolades have done little to increase readership, bring in new advertisers, and improve the bottom line. (Those are not important metrics to most amateur bloggers but they are very important to any employee of a newspaper organization.)
The Star’s operating revenue, its operating profit, its EBITDA and its EBITDA margin all dropped in 2005 compared to 2004. (Its profit margin was up slightly in 2005 at 7.5 per cent compared to 7.4 per cent in 2004.)
The Globe, which competes editorially with the Star but competes on the advertising side only for national advertising programs, does not break out its operating performance to the same detail that The Star does but, the Wall Street Journal article suggests that The Globe is heading in the other direction from an operational standpoint even though The Globe’s blogs are, apparently, difficult to find. 🙂
I agree with The Star’s Antonia Zerbisias that the best thing about blogging is that it is writing without walls — but Antonia has a very specialized beat [the media] and I suspect most newspaper owners in North America give no space to a media columnist and the handful that do give what Zerb gets. So she’s in such a specialized beat that she probably shouldn’t expect to get much space in the paper which makes blogging all the more of a natural.
On the other hand, her Ottawa bureau political colleagues or her colleagues who report on Toronto and area politics get acres and acres of space. So why would they blog? Anything they want to write ends up in a newspaper read by half-a-million people. (I throw down this rhetorical guantlet in the hopes of creating some discussion on this topic, even though I’ve argued here and elsewhere that there are a couple of dozen perfectly good reasons why beat reporters ought to blog).
I use Zerb’s example to point out that, for some, blogs are a great way of breaking down the newspaper’s walls. For other types of reporters, blogs represent a diminishing rate of return, so to speak.