On this week’s edition of Rebooting The News, NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen riffs on the seminal NPR/This American Life co-production from last year, Giant Pool of Money, and finds in it the germ of a compelling argument: Deep reporting is not only good journalism, it may actually be the thing that creates a desire for more news, building new consumers of news where there were none before.
In other words, a topic that may have been something you knew about peripherally through the headlines — say the financial crisis — becomes a must-know obsession once you understand the core facts and the storyline. And the best way to get to such a place of understanding is through unvarnished explanatory journalism.
Here’s an excerpt of Rosen making his case:
[audio:http://niemanlab.org/images/reboot9excerpt.mp3]