Cyberlaw, and Journalism At The Crossroads

Last night, I listened to a great interview of Lawrence Lessig with Terry Gross. Most of what he said were extremely clear and persuasive versions of ideas already on my mind from past articles and programs-- not surprising because Lessig and the center he founded (Stanford's Center for Internet and Society) originated many of our culture's ideas on 21st-century IP law. Overall, he wants the law be flexible and encourage the creativity that content-sharing on the Net allows, from researching academic journals to remixing music samples.

In one great section, Terry asked about the revenue declines that newspapers have been suffering as we increasingly get our news online. Lessig agreed this is a problem, and his greatest concern is that investigative journalism is endangered. Yes we have blogs and Twitter, but newspapers used to assign reporters to a story for months at a time to uncover corruption or expose readers to a faraway war-- an important service for our democracy. Now even major papers can't afford to pay for a long-term assignment.

Lessig said that papers have suffered a lot from Craigslist, which, though a useful tool, has wiped out classifieds. This led me to two questions:

1) Where do newspapers typically make their money? (% subscriptions, % advertising, % classifieds....I would have guessed classifieds are minor.)
2) Do we have a Seymour Hersh (who exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) or Woodward and Bernstein (who broke the story of the Watergate scandal in the Washington Post)? Who are the great investigative journalists of our generation? The two that come to mind are from TV: Christiane Amanpour and Mike Wallace (the latter of which was, incidentally, the great investigative journalist of the last generation).

You can listen to the full interview on the NPR site.