The winner and finalists of this award, administered by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, offer just a glimpse of the best work newspapers do. All involved intensive investigations, months in the making, that few other media currently invest the time, staff, and money to pursue. When people talk, some of them blithely, about life without newspapers, this is what will be lost:
It took thousands of documents and hundreds of interviews for The Charlotte Observer, winner of the award, to uncover horrifying patterns of worker abuse at a North Carolina poultry processing plant. Reporters went far beyond giving plant operators the standard chance to respond; they held stories for months while they located managers who would comment. But that took time and money.
The Columbus Dispatch spent six months analyzing whether proposed legislation targeting illegal immigrants would be right for Ohio. Forgoing easy "balance" by quoting advocates on either side of an emotional issue, the paper's team delved into databases to trace immigration's actual effect on jobs, education, crime, and healthcare. No other institution had done this.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's reporters took personal risks to go deep inside the city's new and dangerous street gangs. The stories successfully trod a delicate line, neither denying the humanity of gang members nor glorifying urban violence. This award is particularly poignant, because the Post-Intelligencer folded its print edition last month and slashed its online newsroom to roughly 20 staffers.
Quality journalism - the type that verifies claims, shines its light into every corner, and demands attribution - is expensive. A blogger with a slingshot can hit a few targets, but can't easily take on entrenched institutions. In 2002, the Globe exposed the cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Boston - an effort that cost the paper on the order of $1 million.
Newspapers matter in other ways, too. Just this week, a story about the pending shutdown of the landmark Chez Vous roller rink in Roxbury, a bulwark of stability in a volatile neighborhood, won a reprieve for the owner when her creditors read about its importance in the Globe. Unlike the Web, which is transient and diffuse, newspapers command the collective attention of a place, providing the civic glue that is so important in an increasingly atomized society.
It isn't news that The Boston Globe is facing an existential crisis. But journalism of the sort only great newspapers provide is essential to every person in a democracy. We don't yet know all the answers to this crisis. But we know the stakes.
(The Boston Globe, publicado el 16 de abril 2009)
