Three of America’s great business magazines have been around for a long time — Forbes since 1917, BusinessWeek since 1929, and Fortune since 1930. I started reading them in 1967 when I completed engineering school and joined IBM. I stopped reading Forbes and Fortune regularly some years ago but have remained faithful to BusinessWeek for more than forty-two years. While some have criticized the magazine from time to time I have always found it an easy to read summary of what is going on in the business world. The business news coverage has been consistently good but what has not been consistent is the number of pages — a recent issue had 68. It used to be hundreds of pages. BusinessWeek has become “paper thin”. Some say that print advertising is coming back. I am not so sure. Looks to me like a ten-degree nose down dive.
As magazines and newspapers shutter, how will we get the news? “Getting” the news is the easy part — iPhones, iPads, PC’s Macs, and TV’s. The bigger issue is with the declines in advertising where will the money come from to pay reporters? There are several possible answers. Yahoo Inc. and the Associated Press have reached a new licensing agreement that will allow the Web portal to continue to host AP articles. Details were not disclosed but it is obvious that the deal means that Yahoo! will start to pay more for the news they provide to their site members and visitors. Similar deals with Google, Microsoft and other portals are likely. AP is getting more clever at tracking where it’s news shows up and will do it’s best to eliminate free publication of their news.
A second part of the puzzle is the reduction of the number of reporters. Just as automation has reduced the need for certain skills in the economy, so too will the ubiquity of the Internet impact the scale of reporters that are needed. A breaking news story does not need to be covered by a reporter at each and every newspaper or magazine. Some news can be covered by the readers themselves. Crowdsourcing can be applied to most any endeavor. A sporting event, town hall meeting, an accident or a parade could be “covered” by crowds of people who take pictures, interview each other, write their commentary and publish it through various aggregators. News organizations themselves may utilize crowdsourcing.
The most profound question about reporting though is investigative reporting. It is not about just what is happening but why is it happening, what were the factors leading up to the news “event”, what are the motivations of the various people associated with the issue, and what might the short term and long term impact be? These are questions that require skills of journalism to uncover. Not any reporter can get access to interview key figures nor does every reporter have the skills to ask the right questions and engage in discovery through dialog Last but not least is the editor. Who decides what headline to attach to  a story? Who decides whether the story will be one paragraph or six two pages? Who insures the integrity of a story and that it is not biased? The editor. And is the editor biased himself or herself? A story may be considered liberal by one reader and conservative by another. This is a complex issue but I think news.google.com has the roots of the solution.
The top story at the time of this writing is “Senate jobs bill passed key hurdle on Monday night“. The story was by Ed Hornick and Tami Luhby at CNN. The headline was followed by a couple of sentences describing what the story is about. Then follows two other versions of the story — “GOP’s Brown branded turncoat for jobs bill vote” by the Seattle Post Intelligencer and “US Senate could pass a jobs bill this week” by Reuters. These are followed by coverage of the story by Atlantic Online, USA Today, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Finally, for this one story, there is a link to all 1,718 news articles (and blog postings). The point is that if you feel that The XYZ Press is biased in some way, you can pick a publication that you are more comfortable with — that you trust — or you may decide to read versions of the story at multiple publications and compare them with your own point of view. The news business is being reshaped by the Internet and the ultimate control is with the people.