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Missing the Story Reason Online

23.03.10

Has anyone checked the Internet connection at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute lately? Last week, the Institute announced the nominees for its “ Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade ,” and of the 80 contenders, only three were originally published on the web. In contrast, 22 of the pieces appeared as books, 14 appeared in magazines, and 21 appeared in newspapers, which for those of you unfamiliar with the term, are those large gray sheets of wood pulp that various media conglomerates produce to help subsidize America’s recycling industry.

Granted, the intention of this list is to recognize outstanding instances of journalism, not their delivery methods. And no doubt most of the newspaper and magazine stories it has singled out, along with pieces that originally aired on TV and radio, appear online. But in a decade characterized by radical shifts in the way news is produced and distributed, it’s still pretty startling to see a list of stories that for the most part could have been compiled in, oh, 1980. Read through the nominees— feature and seemingly hundreds on citizen journalism, community-funded reporting, hyper-local journalism, Twitter’s effect on the news, and the future of context, amongst others. Perhaps because we’re all looking ahead, wondering how these various approaches to news-gathering are going to evolve, it’s easy to forget that, throughout the decade, they were already having an impact at least as important as David Foster Wallace’s musings on political campaigning or Caitlin Flanagan’s first-person reporting from the front lines of the Nanny Wars.

Surely, there must have been some way for the list-makers to acknowledge that for the first time in history, hundreds of American soldiers were filing public dispatches about life during wartime. Or that journalists like Josh Marshall had begun to see their readers as a powerful investigative resource . Or that thanks to Twitter, the real-time eyewitness accounts from plane crashes and earthquakes start flowing faster than ever now.

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