Bien, Alan Cowell

Un corresponsal como quedan pocos propone en el NYT algunas ideas interesantes acerca de la encrucijada en que está hoy el periodismo. Él se identifica como el último corresponsal en usar palomas mensajeras. Aquí está la pieza completa y les dejo un greatest hits acá abajo:

[…] the old compact between writer and reader needs recasting and reinforcing for a new age.

[…] news — reliable, checked-out, best-we-can-get news — certainly does not come cheap, still less free.

The cover price of a newspaper acknowledges that news has a value and a price worth paying. Yet that idea sometimes seems remote to a Web-savvy generation brought up to believe that their laptops offer a portal to a cost-free universe.

The challenge for business strategists is to earn serious money from digital news […].

But it is hard to see how any business model can work unless the reader accepts some basic premises: news is vital to democratic society; it is the oxygen of freedom, the basis of critical decisions; and news costs money.

Newspapers […] shine light where those in power seek the same darkness that cloaks Tehran.

News gathering takes time, energy, courage, people, humility, creativity and layers of editorial oversight to guarantee the authenticity of the final product. For all the human flaws of those who gather, edit, check and analyze it, news allows people to judge for themselves whether the people they voted into office merit their trust and their tax dollars.

As the Twitter revolution has shown, the ascendancy of new methods of spreading the news — a kind of digital, high-speed word-of-mouth — reinforces the need for assembling it, sifting it and trying to make sense of it. […]

We lose all that at our peril.