The Top of the Newsbiz

After the show, ’09 plays anchor with Charles Gibson ’74.

At Washington’s monumental Newseum, journalism is celebrated as a vital part of democracy. But in the real world is it thriving or has it become a museum piece, a reminder of glory days past? After visiting the Newseum in D.C., the Knight-Wallace Fellows ’09 took the train to New York to find out. We crossed Manhattan on a whistlestop tour to visit potential museum pieces and some of the upstarts that believe they are the future.

The NYC tour kicked off at a breakfast meeting with New Yorker contributor Ken Auletta. The author of “Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way” is writing a book about Google News that will address key questions about the future of journalism.

“It was a remarkable hour. We could have spent all day with him,” said Richard Deitsch, our Sports Illustrated Fellow, speaking for many of us.

But time was pressing and we had to rush uptown to Bloomberg Tower, one of the 20 tallest skyscrapers in Manhattan. Michael Bloomberg, New York’s richest man and its mayor, has never set foot in the new headquarters of the company he created in the 1980s, our tour guides told us. The Knight-Wallace Fellows weren’t so shy and admired its sweeping glass and steel curves, giant news tickers, coy carp pools and the piles of free refreshments available to nourish workers (and, presumably, discourage them from straying too far from their desks).

Over lunch we got the chance to question Andy Lack, a former head of news at NBC recently hired to head up Bloomberg’s multimedia division. Lack was understandably guarded about his planned overhaul of TV operations, but spoke of equipping all 1,500 Bloomberg reporters with video cameras. (A week after our visit Bloomberg TV announced 100 job losses, the first layoffs in the company’s almost 30-year history.)

On the other side of Central Park, we watched Charlie Gibson broadcast his “World News” show live at ABC’s studios. For the non-Americans among us, Gibson is best known for his interview with vicepresidential candidate Sarah Palin: for his “gotcha” question about what she thought of Bush’s foreign policy doctrine and her deer-in-the-headlights response, “In what respect, Char-lie?”

Gibson was a journalism Fellow at Michigan in the early 1970s, the first year of the program that evolved into the Knight-Wallace Fellowship. But the likelihood of any of us ending up filling his shoes is not only statistically tiny, but some Fellows also wondered how long the institution of network news would survive as younger generations look elsewhere for their information.

The next day we entered the brave new world of ProPublica. In offices near Wall Street, it’s an experiment in one of the new business models for journalism we had been discussing since our talk with Ken Auletta. I could almost hear my fellow Fellows salivating at the idea of reporters given the time and resources to investigate worthy news stories. But with ProPublica entirely funded at present by philanthropy, can this really be called a “business” model?

Finally, back uptown to the last stop on our tour. Off the square to which it gave its name, The New York Times is as Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellows University of Michigan Mike and Mary Wallace House 620 Oxford Road Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2635 much a monument to the history of news as DC’s Newseum. For a “dead wood product,” as the techies like to call newspapers, the Times was in optimistic form, the generations of Pulitzer winners looking down from their frames on reporters busy filling a daily paper and one of the world’s most popular Websites.

Delayed at LaGuardia airport on the way back to Detroit, I scribbled this first reflection of our East coast tour: “…at times inspiring, at times scary, always great fun and really allowed me to think more about the future of journalism and my own career.” Maybe that sums up not just the trip but also the Fellowship itself.