How Pressure for Profits Is Perverting Journalism Welcome to a new era in the American newsroom, where the push by investors and owners of media companies for ever richer returns is diminishing many newspapers, magazines, and news shows. Soft coverage lifestyle, celebrity, service spreads like kudzu.
Some newspapers use factory-like systems to evaluate reporters' productivity.
Then they wonder why passion in the profession is dwindling. As a matter of principle, editors and news directors long resisted the prosecutor's subpoena for notes or outtakes. That resistance seems to be weakening. After The New York Times learned of U.S. government plans to capture and try the former Cambodian dictator, the Clinton administration asked the paper not to run a story to no avail. If authors write, agents represent, editors approve, publishers distribute, retailers sell, and consumers buy inaccurate nonfiction books, then something's wrong.