Even when we are not attacking each other within newsrooms, there is, at best, a malaise and maybe at worse, a sort of pervasive negativism that you see. I do believe it affects us. I believe it affects what we do everyday in newsrooms. It affects our physical energy. It certainly affects how we see our mission, and it affects our enthusiasm for going after stories.
Many journalists tend to live on the dark side anyway.
This has really put a lot of them on the even darker side. The causes of this disconnect are, of course, varied. Obviously, the focus on profits has had an affect. The business side worried about that, because making money in newspapers was easy. The business side and the publisher had no problem keeping that wall up and protecting the journalists from knowing that the money changers were in the other rooms.