CBS News and contemporary journalism

Thursday July 29th, 2010

Last night CBS News covered some major reporting done by Bloomberg Markets Magazine, with the photographic participation of our own Bill Cramer. In the spirit of citizen journalism, we’ve grabbed some lo-fi screenshots for those of you who may have missed it.

Katie Couric reported on the story of Cindy Lohman, the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan, who feels betrayed by Prudential Insurance. The company has kept the large sum of money from her son Sgt. Ryan Baumann’s life insurance policy in its corporate account, yielding high interest rates for the company.

One of the really unique features of this story is that Lohman only discovered the truth about her son’s policy due to the work of David Evans, an award-winning journalist with Bloomberg. He called her while writing a well-documented and comprehensive report about the life insurance policies of service members.

Left, Bloomberg journalist David Evans (image from CBS); right, Cindy Lohman (photo by Bill Cramer/Philadelphia).

You can read Couric’s article on the CBS website. NPR has also posted the story, along with one of Bill’s pictures.

This kind of meta-journalism—in this case, reporting on the role played by another reporter—is becoming increasingly common as “new media” formats grow in importance and become crucial for the “old media” to follow. One example is the website Wikileaks, which has recently made big news upon its release of more than 90,000 internal US military documents relating to the War in Afghanistan.

The New York Times has extensively covered the website and its impact (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4). The release has been compared to the Pentagon Papers, documents providing evidence of government deception leading to the war in Vietnam that were leaked in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg. The Wall Street Journal reported on Ellsberg’s reaction:

Mr. Ellsberg marveled at how far technology has come, that with the click of a mouse such a massive volume of information can be released. He said he stood over a Xerox machine for hours, carefully making copies of each page of the Pentagon papers.

Ellsberg has expressed doubt that any of the papers poses a risk to national security, though he does see risk to the personal security of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. (You can watch a fascinating interview of Assange by TED curator Chris Anderson.)

The significance of the documents has not been entirely clear; as First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams told the Wall Street Journal, the digital distribution of this volume of documents made speed a priority over careful review, and there is not much new information or evidence of deception contained in them. However, Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post argues in his review of media responses that this digital leak has made it difficult for journalists to gloss over information that they may have downplayed in the past.

The “old media” have also had to report on the ways that digital journalism has changed the structure of the industry. A recent NYT article on Politico and other online news organizations paints a picture of a high-stress work environment oriented entirely around being the first to get a story, and getting the most hits for that story. Another article discussed how SEO has changed the way headlines are written.

Are these changes affecting photography? Share your views in the comments.

-Asad Haider