Beat reporting: Bad for journalism?
The Miami Herald has posted an interesting column, saying that the standard method of newsroom organization is bad for journalism:
A colleague on the police beat had learned of minor wrongdoing involving town cops. But publishing a story on it would come at the cost of the reporter’s continued access to valuable sources within the police department. Worse, she said, her state’s law allows police to withhold practically all information about investigations that haven’t brought arrests.
”This means that reporters have to keep up a good relationship with officers in order to get anything on unsolved crimes, no matter how small or how serious,” she said in her posting to the online ethics site I participate in. So the reporter faced a choice: She could sit on a perfectly newsworthy story that would embarrass the sources she relies on, or she could write it and sacrifice her future effectiveness as a police reporter.
It’s a conundrum, but it’s more than an occasional problem for a small-town paper. In fact, this conflict has been institutionalized into a routine reality that traditional journalists face, thanks to the near-universal adoption of a particular way of organizing newsrooms. Here I’m talking about beats.
Under the beat system, reporters are assigned specific subject areas and, more to the point, responsibility to cover the public or private institutions that dominate them. The upside of the beat system is clear. It encourages journalists to develop pockets of expertise so they can report knowledgeably on topics that require focus and specialization to understand.
But the beat system also requires reporters to get to know the people who control the information their coverage depends on, so they can call on those sources and rely on them. And here’s where the problems begin. The reporter’s success in covering a beat depends on the cooperation of the people being covered — and not just their cooperation, but their good will. If you deliberately set out to invent an arrangement less conducive to tough, adversarial reporting, it would be hard to beat beats.
Seen from that perspective, we shouldn’t be surprised that journalism is so often timid and reverential toward sources; the miracle is that journalists are ever tough and courageous, that beat reporters do defy their sources. But that’s a mark of their own guts and ethical maturity, and of the presence of determined informants within the institutions they cover. It’s not testimony to the wisdom of the system within which reporters operate.
Would journalism suffer if beats were abandoned? Running a staff would be harder, but life could get interesting. Time and again great stories have been broken by outsiders with clear eyes, who owe nothing to those who feed and water the beat reporters. Watergate didn’t come out of The Washington Post’s political staff, the My Lai massacre wasn’t uncovered by a Pentagon correspondent, and the White House press corps was complicit in the disinformation campaign leading up to the Iraq invasion.
Beats have got to go. They’re an endemic conflict of interest. Fortunately, they are going, and while Internet scribes have areas of interest and expertise, they have so far resisted institutionalizing themselves in the sclerotic fashion of traditional news media. Reporters can be smart and informed, and still be free.
I think the notion that Internet writers don’t carve out tiny little niches that are essentially beats is wrong; I think most of the writers who take it as seriously as offline journalists do are doing exactly that.
I didn’t study journalism in school beyond one class required for all Communications Studies majors at Virginia Tech (and, of course, my broadcasting classes there), so the origins of beat reporting are a new one on me.
I’m not sure how practical getting rid of beat reporting would be, and I suspect the short-term losses of having reporters who know, say, local government well enough to cover it with any sort of insight might outweigh the long-term gains of not having reporters beholden to their subjects. But columnist Edward Wasserman is right that it’s an awkward dance at times.
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“Would journalism suffer if beats were abandoned? Running a staff would be harder, but life could get interesting.”
He really needs to elaborate on this point. What are the strengths of doing away with beats other than dropping the weaknesses associated with beats?
Comment by Jeff Hamilton — January 19, 2007 @ 7:21