When the going gets tough … use J-students to report?

The Boston Globe is the latest Top 30 newspaper to use alternative methods to gathering news. For the Sunday Globe it was eight journalism graduate students from Northeastern University for a Page One piece "advocating for senior citizens."

Neither the content nor the level of reporting is at issue; what is is the experimentation we are seeing from community newspapers to papers with a million-plus circulation like the Globe. The need for a new economic model is becoming more apparent each day, as long-term commitment investigative reporting slowly becomes a thing of the past. Or at the least a thing that needs to be restructured for the future.

ProPublica, with $10 million committed a year by a donor, employs 25 invesitgative reporters and its plan details making the reporting available free online.

The Massachusetts Institute for the Common Wealth (self-described as a nonpartisan education and research institute) reported that the future may be in college students. MassINC lists the 20 most interesting prospects, including Bay Area news orgs looking into the murder of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey, and the fact that only a few, such as the New York Times and Frontline, have their own investigative reporters.

 

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