A two-day symposium on the future of investigative reporting brought the industry’s top editors and reporters together at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism over the weekend. CIR reporters and Executive Director Robert Rosenthal were joined by Paul Steiger, the editor in chief of ProPublica, Bill Buzenberg of the Center for Public Integrity, and Lowell Bergman, whose Investigative Reporting Program at Berkeley organized the event.
Robert J. Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting, got right to the point. “The reality,” he said, “is the newspaper industry in this country has been destroyed.”
Rosenthal should know. He’s seen the carnage up close, as editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer in Knight Ridder’s declining days and as managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle as it staggered under the burden of an imposing annual deficit.
He made the comment over the weekend during the Reva and David Logan Symposium on Investigative Reporting at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. The symposium’s title sounded pretty grim – “The crisis in news: Is there a future for investigative reporting?” But as it turned out, the two-day gathering, featuring panels and an audience both studded with outstanding journalists, wasn’t quite as dominated by despair as you might guess.
>> Read more in the American Journalism Review.
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