Joby Warrick one of the two excellent reporters on that series left soon for the WaPo and is still there. Pat Stith chose to stay at the N&O, even though he could have gone anywhere.

the switch to PR is not easy, the mindset is very different the opposite of journo thinking, even if the money is better. i did it for a short time for Schwab in SF during the Internet boom gold rush bubble. i had a sign-on bonus (can you imagine that for a former journo) then a pink slip within a year. this decade is nothing like what we thought in 1999. let’s partly like it was 1999.

on a tangent, you probably know that Jim Cramer was a former reporter, editor of the Harvard Crimson. he was working in Tallahassee and i think was among the first people to arrive at the dorm of the Ted Bundy killings. (i’m too lazy to google it.)

yes, agree of not know what we had.

On balance, though, I think reporters now (last few decades) are far more capable (and less corrupt) than the older ones. Ethics codes and J-school (a mixed blessing) have made it more of a profession, and with fewer and smaller-ed-staffed dailies, competition for the few jobs there are is intense. That’s why I said earlier that even though the newspaper are shells of their former selves in some ways, the reporting they still do, is generally a lot better.

Bottom line is we as a society will not know what we had ’til it’s gone. I think we agree on that.

from there I moved to a regional paper in the Carolinas for $40K, a raise from the cost of living. not bad for a single guy, but i could not have supported family. newspaper salaries have historically been horrid until woodstein and Watergate drawing more talent. even so, the smartest high school kids don’t go into journalism in the past 30 years. they’re certainly not going to now.

but i knew that, the pay, when i went into the biz. that is why i eventually left. i was an interesting job, for energetic younger people, i was neither energetic and getting older. at DJ news, i sat the GM’s CFO office asking questions and met many interesting regular people. slowly i realized my Wall Street sources were making 10 times my salary and more and they weren’t 10 times smarter than me, they just chose a better profession. but Wall Street pay is changing too. i posted this earlier here, but i can’t get my arms around Raj at Galleon’s bail of $1ooM, and net worth of $1.3B (i’m not saying he’s guilty of anything, but the money is surreal.)

finally, journalists have written about layoffs and reduction in work forces and dying industries for years, and now they really understand how that feels.

reporting is not a well paying profession. most of the reporters don’t work at networks or the NYT.”

I agree with the first part, but until recently, I would take [a little bit] issue with the second. I’m not saying that reporters and/or editors were well-paid, but they weren’t in sack-cloth either. [Until recently] A second-tier guild paper compensated reporters pretty well in salary, and very well with respect to non-monetary benefits. No, they didn’t get rich, but they had job security and a way-more-interesting-than-average job than other people making about the same $$$$$. Small point, and I certainly don’t derive any pleasure from these folks getting reverse-adjustments, furloughs, etc. And I certainly don’t think there is any obvious replacement for the value of primary reporting that will be lost as dailies become even more unviable.

as a former reporter, i know the limitation of the medium. reporters are generally writers with no expertise in the field we are writing about. what i meant is that if you have knowledge, real expertise about stocks or law, you wouldn’t become a writer. you would work for a hedge fund or practice law.
regarding your specialty, of course you will know significant developments generally before we do, and you will have access to superior interested-party “experts” that aren’t on our call-list for quotes. but we’re not writing for you, we’re writing for the masses. it would take an attorney to have the superior access, and if you have a law degree, why would you toil at a newspaper for pennies? most true experts don’t want to be quoted in the paper, so we are limited to the people who are willing to talk to us, and on deadline too. (i say we but i left journalism 10 years ago.)

reporting is not a well paying profession. most of the reporters don’t work at networks or the NYT.

all the people cheering the death of newspapers (as others have said here) you will find that bloggers like Barry can’t do his analysis without the original grunt work by reporters.

it’s also the economics of the web. Chris Anderson at Wired says if newspapers got rid of the paper editions, it would lose half of its cost, but 75% of its revenues. it’s a death spiral. craig’s list and many other sites have already poached the ad revenues. many people think papers are dying because of ideology or boring writing or subjects — technology is the bigger killer. if you are getting information for free at TBP, why would you pay for it at a news site? but soon, there will be no news sites to generate information for Barry to analyze. welcome to the freemium world.

A good perspective on the death of newspapers and what it means from a sports point of view in the middle of this podcast from March. The guy hosting the podcast, Bill Simmons, whose dream as he put it was to be a sports columnist for the Boston Globe when he first broke into journalism and now is the most popular “internet sports journalist”, has been touching on this a lot with various people.

Another point I forgot to pick up on. He later in another podcast talked to Bob Ley, one of the first employees at ESPN who has been there since, and Ley made the point that in the state of Connecticut there’s a budget crisis going on in government and that their local paper, the Hartford Courant, was covering it with front-page coverage every day. If there was no Hartford Courant, who would be covering the issue and letting the public know what is going on? It’s certainly not going to be Barry Ritholtz. It’s largely only going to be people inside the state of Connecticut that are interested in government and politics, and that’s very likely only going to be biased points of view from Democratic and Republican partisans. So instead of democratizing journalism, I think the internet is more just going to take us back 130 years to the late 1800s on a political level, where the sources of information were openly biased in favor of one side or the other and any hope of neutrality is gone. Who is the most popular internet guy that covers politics based on site hits, isn’t it Drudge who is openly Republican?

I have to take issue with this.

1. Barry still uses the newspapers and editorial columns for a lot of his source material as it gives him something to bounce off. In other words, he excels very much as a sort of reactionary columnist. If this source material went away, Barry’s blog would suffer.

2. There are a lot of idiots on the internet, most of whom hide by ambiguity to give themselves a veneer of credibility, and some of them have far too much readership for comfort. There’s another financial blog I read and one of them linked to an article once that she wanted us to read, and the article was written by a 9/11 conspiracy nut that believes the Rothschilds and the New World Order are going to destroy us all.

3. Who’s going to do the in-depth reporting now? We know that the money on the internet can’t sustain a newspaper model. Yesterday, Yahoo shut down Geocities, and one person commented on it in a story I read that “Geocities was the first example 10 years ago that you can have something incredibly popular on the internet and still not able to make money on it.” A blogger sure as hell doesn’t have the time or money or sources to do it, nor the credibility because he gets lumped into all bloggers, both good and bad, and unfortunately there are a good number out there that are complete crackpots. Bloggers are a lot like the Libertarian Party in that respect. I just feel like the death of newspapers is going to lead to even less criticism of decisions of the social and political elite because there will be few people with credibility that can criticize them.