The editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Peter Stothard writes:
My old generation of journalists was trained (in as much as we were trained at all) to deal with sources who concealed and lied.
The new generation, suggests the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell, needs training in the comprehension of what is freely, accurately and massively available.
After publishing a piece about Enron in The New Yorker, Gladwell said in his blog that:
We’ve spent a lot of time, post-Enron, criticizing the flaws in the investment community’s gatekeeping activities.
But I think we should also recognize what the Enron case tells us about the value of newspaper journalism.
Maybe, in other words, we have underestimated the value of impartial, professionally-motivated, under-paid and overworked generalists in tackling the kind of information-rich, analysis-dependent “mysteries” that the modern world throws at us.
All of which, of course, points out the irony of what’s happening in the newspaper business right now.
We are dismantling the institution of newspaper journalism precisely at the moment when it seems to be of greatest social value.