The formerly sacrosanct separation between editorial and advertising is slowly crumbling as the bottom drops out of media budgets. What was once referred to as a wall is now more like a fence, Natalie Pompilio reports for the American Journalism Review. And that fence has a front door, and some holes in it.

“While many experts agree the beleaguered news industry has to change its ways in order to survive,” Pompilio writes, “the question is how to do so while maintaining credibility and standards.”

Source: American Journalism Review 

With the media in freefall, newspapers are fighting to survive and journalism schools are struggling to stay relevant. The Anniston Star newspaper and the University of Alabama have found a partnership that could help both. Using a grant from the Knight Foundation, the Anniston Star has started accepting master’s students for a community journalism program to pitch and report stories and supplement the newspaper’s editorial coverage.

The move was met with some resistance from the paper’s editorial staff. Troy Turner, who was the executive editor of the Star before the program began, told the American Journalism Review, “They wanted a training model like a Navy hospital ship. But we worked like a battleship, with all guns blazing. We wanted to continue doing the solid journalism that the Anniston Star had long been known for doing.” Now that the program has started, however, Turner admits that the it’s having some success.

Other journalism schools haven’t had as easy of a time adjusting. When the New York Times partnered with the City University of New York for their own community journalism project, “The Local,” New York Magazine reports that the move was seen as a slight to the University of Columbia venerable journalism school.

Since then Columbia has increased its efforts to stay current. According to New York Magazine, the school will soon offer “a revamped, digitally focused curriculum designed to make all students as capable of creating an interactive graphic as they are of pounding out 600 words on a community-board meeting.” But just as many old-school journalists don’t want to dive into blogging, professors at Columbia are less than enthusiastic about going digital. Ari Goldman, a 16-year professor of Columbia’s Reporting and Writing 1 (RW1) class, is quoted as saying “fuck new media,” describing the move to digital as “an experimentation in gadgetry.”

Image by Bluemarine, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Source: American Journalism Review, New York Magazine 

In the history of scandals, Randall “Duke” Cunningham has got to be one of the best. In 2005, the California congressman was found guilty of taking more than $2 million in bribes in a conspiracy allegedly involving defense contractors and prostitutes. The story was broken by reporters from the San Diego Union-Tribune, though none of those reporters are still with the paper, according to the American Journalism Review. 

In fact, reporters who cover the federal government from a local angle—as the ink-stained Pulitzer Prize-winners from the San Diego Union-Tribune were—have largely disappeared from the American media landscape. Newspapers across the country are cutting corners and shrinking budgets, and the Washington correspondents for local papers are a major casualty.

“Nobody else would've gotten Duke Cunningham” says George Condon, the former Washington bureau chief of the Copley News Service, the company that owns the San Diego Union-Tribune. “USA Today, AP, New York Times, none of them would devote resources to a backbench, local San Diego congressman in that kind of detail.”

Many newspapers are trying to cover the federal government remotely, relying more on wire service reports and national news reports. This creates huge gaps in coverage, as the national issues affecting local areas simply aren’t written about. Bill Walsh, a former Washington correspondent for New Orleans' Times-Picayune, says that less information on the national government will lead already cynical Americans to disengage from the civic process. “That hurts democracy,” says Walsh. “And if there are fewer people to report what is really going on, it adds to the cynicism.”

Image by  CJStumpf , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Why do cable news shows exist? They don’t break news, but once they find a story they like—the Reverend Wright kerfuffle or the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth for example—the talking heads will bang on the controversy like a child with a saucepan and a metal spoon. And the problems with cable news don’t stay quarantined inside of Fox News or CNN. A recent article for the American Journalism Review (AJR) scrutinizes the "cable news effect" on the rest of the mainstream media. Most journalists understandably recoil at the notion of the 24-hour news networks influencing editorial decisions, but cable news’ ability to keep a story on the media agenda is undeniable.

Cable news viewership is eclipsed by that of network news, according to research by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), but its influence is not to be underestimated. One reason, according to AJR, is that most mainstream newsrooms have at least one television constantly tuned to a 24 hour news network. Some editors have spoken of an “osmosis” effect, where the cable news ideas tend to seep into the minds of the rest of the media.

It must be difficult for cable news programmers to fill some 18 hours of programming each day. But instead of focusing on important issues, PEJ research shows that, “tabloid-tinged crime and celebrity” stories and bombastic pundits tend to dominate the airwaves. The repetitive, formulaic coverage offered by the 24-hour news networks doesn’t always serve to elevate public discourse, but it gets the point across.

The problem is that the cable news formula has been working. The AJR reports that cable news has been gaining in  popularity and prestige over recent years, and so far there’s no reason to think that trend won’t continue. So long as cable news continue to influence the rest of the media, those talking heads won’t go away any time soon.