- ‹ previous
- 632 of 8902
- next ›
Cost of the NYT Magazine NOLA Story Broken Down
In the issue that hits doorsteps this Sunday, the New York Times Magazine has published a two-year investigation by Dr. Sheri Fink, a staff reporter with the nonprofit investigative journalism shop ProPublica, into the claims that Dr. Anna Pou and other medical personnel at New Orleans’ Memorial Hospital, euthanized patients after the hospital was flooded, supplies ran out, and the staff struggled to treat scores of patients who were not evacuated.
The piece is great, and will be (damn them) hard to beat when the American Society of Magazine Editors hands out its annual award for public interest journalism. (And then there's that little thing called a Pulitzer.) Not only because it reveals facts that many other news stories as well as a grand jury investigation failed to unearth, but also because it somehow allows you to feel both sympathy for and horror at the doctors’ actions. It also reveals how various philosophies of triage conflict with each other, and how little training doctors have with any of them. Read it and take a look at all the nifty online extras, too.
So: what does a piece like this cost? In one of those “get to know a Times staffer” Q&As, Gerry Marzorati, the NYTM’s editor said that he and the editors of ProPublica did a back of the napkin calculation. Upshot: $400,000.
Now, that sounds like a lot. It is a lot. Gerry has said before that most NYTM cover stories average out at @ $40K, which is the average per-issue edit buy budget for this magazine. But reading the piece, the price tag didn’t surprise me. And if it surprises you, it’s because most people don’t realize how expensive and laborious investigative journalism can be. So to help folks understand, I asked Gerry to break down the $400,000. He obliged, emailing:
Ok, roughly:
2 years of reporting by a staff writer, full-time: 200k
Editing for that period by 2 ProPublica editors: 30k
Lawyering hours at ProPublica: 20K
Editing hours at the Times magazine over past year (from me to copy editors, 5 editors in all involved): 40k
Times fact-checking: 10k
Photography fees plus expenses: 40k
Times lawyering fees: 20k
Web and Web graphic costs at both the Times and ProPublica: 10k
Cost of adding 6 pages to the feature well to accommodate story: 24kTotal: 394k
Now Sheri got a grant during one of those years from the Kaiser Foundation, meaning some smallish portion of the overall cost was not carried by the NYT or ProPublica. And Sheri did report some other stories for PP during this time. But balance against that what’s not included in this rough calculation: proportional overhead for both organizations including rent, equipment, travel costs, libel insurance (there’s a reason a story like this gets so much attention from lawyers), distribution, servers, etc.
My point? This story—which could result in criminal prosecutions and should result in a national conversation among doctors and hospitals around their triage and emergency procedures—is the kind of work that is in peril now that the financial underpinnings (i.e. advertising) for journalism have collapsed. Bloggers and commenters and citizen journalists can’t take on a project like this. They can add to it, amplify it, criticize it, and generally run with it, but a project like this requires consistent, institutional teams of reporters and editors and factcheckers and lawyers and web dudes. In our most recent editors' note, Monika and I explain what’s going on to the media and the threat that the collapse of institutional reporting poses to a healthy democracy, concluding:
What it's going to take [to turn things around] is for many more Americans to decide that quality reporting—be it on local school boards or Iraq or climate negotiations—is as vital to their lives as box scores and celebrity spats. As media theorist Clay Shirky recently wrote, "Journalism is about more than dissemination of news; it's about the creation of shared awareness," and ultimately the ability to act on that awareness. Because make no mistake: This is a zero-sum equation. Less journalism = less accountability. Corruption, nepotism, cronyism, and propaganda thrive when reporting dies. That's not a price we're prepared to pay.
Update: Zach Seward of Niemam Jounalism Lab (@NiemanLab and one of my favorite sources on media news out there), also dug into the numbers on Friday—a post I surely would have seen and linked to had we not had a server implosion. Read Zach's post, he poses some interesting questions about measuring cost-benefit analysis, when costs are shared.
Clara Jeffery is Co-Editor of Mother Jones. You can follow more of her stories here and follow her on Twitter here.
Saving newspapers
There are 123,000 libraries in the United States. I would support a project where citizens like myself contributed a yearly subscription of any newspaper to one or more of these libraries. Newspapers have been such an important part of our lives that I, for one, want to take an active role in trying to save them by increasing the number of subscriptions of the troubled newspapers. But there is a need for a clearing house of someone willing and able to conduct such a program. Any takers?
I wish there were some way I
I wish there were some way I could rate strand-by-strand as the obvious spam it is, but I guess all I can do is comment on the article. When the old guard media mentions that investigative journalism is expensive, it's a valid point because investigative journalism is expensive. And I for one would indeed like to support good investigative journalism. But I don't have any interest in supporting the old guard media, because they haven't earned my respect, and I'm not sure they want me to. Obviously no old guard media will put the truth first because primarily they are a for-profit business so they have to look after their bottom line, which means not upseting their advertisers. Which means all I expect to see is things their advertisers condone, which means distractions against any alternative to the status quo. Which means we die as fictional people invent new kinds of ownership for themselves and more ways to disempower the real people while the planet and people are raped and destroyed. We need to stop rewarding behaviors that destoy everything. And yes, that means much will change, so anything that does this will be "radical".
will we as a people (not as
will we as a people (not as an advertising market) ever be able to fund such quality investigative-journalism pieces? this is more than twitter could ever do. twitter could spread rumors and gloss over the one-in-a-million voice reporting the bare threads of this story; or, twitter can comment upon this story. not much else.
the question is, how to save (and fund) quality journalism, without becoming just another consumer-addict feeding on what advertising wants to sell?
i.e., how can quality journalism survive when everyone hates those mass media companies?
Web Dudes? Really?
I'll spare you the full fledged rant and just note that I expected a little more of Mother Jones. Welcome to 2009. Women and others who do not identify as "dude" are an important part of the online presence of plenty of news outlets.
Dude! Chill!
Amanda, it is our opinion, including the opinion of our copy editor, that in many usages "dude" has become gender neutral. Sorry if you took offense, dude.
Clara Jeffery
Co-Editor
You could have actually
You could have actually apologized. Something like "you're right: I chose a gendered term to refer to that amorphous network of programmers, system administrators and web producers that keep sites like ours and propublica's running. It was a cop out, because I couldn't think of a better term."
Or, you could just keep with the cop-outs and insult me. Which is always easier.
this is more than twitter
tagged as:- result
this is more than twitter could ever do. twitter could spread rumors and gloss over the one-in-a-million voice reporting the bare threads of this story.
find people search engine
It's not one or the other!
I'm a little tired of arguments being put forward as proof that traditional media is here to stay or that social media is the future. The cost of producing this story doesn't mean heritage media is justified or that blogging is a fad. What it does prove is that both have their place and role to play in the broader scheme of things.
What we should be debating is not heritage versus new media, but how the two can co-exist and support each other for even better results.
it isn't the fault of new media and bloggers that the advertising model for newspapers collapsed. It's the fault of newspaper proprietors that failed to adapt quickly enough. There is a model out there - it just takes a brave media magnate to identify it and be the first to push it out as it most likely will be a complete shift from the old subscrition or advertising supported system.
as a print journalist turned
as a print journalist turned blog editor, i really appreciate this story about how investigative journalism happens. thanks for this behind the scenes look. while social media and blogging have a massive and interesting role to play in moving media forward, they've also made it difficult for some to understand the hows and whys behind the $ and time spent on this kind of reporting (radical and exorbitant as it occasionally might be).
Investigative costs...
I opined that the cost for not having investigative reporting would be more costly than not paying these upfront costs. When we allow costs to dictate what information is gleaned from good hard nosed reporting we as society lose.