Yesterday I gave suggestions for the new Globe owners and/or a start-up regarding credibility and ombudsman and Shield Law.
Today I discuss hiring practices for the newsroom.
Forget bull shit journalism schools, the newspaper should hire people trained in digging up information and interpreting facts
Attorneys experienced in Freedom of Information Law and litigation/trial attorneys would be essential to creating an investigative team that can earn respect and credibility.
There are many experienced street smart lawyers out there who would jump at a chance to do this and quit practicing. Great for crime reporting, business reporting, real estate, government, politics. Get lawyers from those areas of practice to make career changes. That is the foundation of a great reporting staff. Of course experience newspaper people need to run it and edit . Build reporting teams.
Also, it doesn’t hurt for reporters to have a law school education even if never practiced. You can’t get, in my opinion, a better foundation. Preferable to journalism school graduate.
A well funded start-up newspaper would be much easier run and have greater potential than plastic surgery on the old hag known as the Boston Globe.
I would say that the Globe already has a plethora of folks who “interpret” the facts. That’s one of the reasons so many thinking people have stopped reading it.
would be if the Globe let the data drive the conclusion, instead of the other way around. They have a bad habit of only half-digging, and then wrapping the data around a foregone conclusion.