(30) From Woodward and Bernstein to Donald Trump: A Career

This book is a recounting of a profession that is on the downhill side of history. It's far too fashionable today for front offices to tell us that all we need is a better use of white space, color graphics, more features, and online bells and whistles to slow the decline. They seem impervious to the fact that there is nothing online that wasn't first gathered and compiled by a journalist. But the individuals preaching these tactics are not newspaper people. Newspapers today are run by ad and circulation department execs, "Bean Counters," whose first and only allegiance is to the bottom line and certainly not to the primary product of a newspaper, which is THE NEWS. The bean counter approach is, and always has been, to turn the newspaper business into just that--A BUSINESS--which according to the Constitution it was never meant to be. Bean counters' priority, as is their wont, is always the bottom line. And their adherence to that principle has surely adversely compromised the newsroom, causing staff to be cut to the bone and leaving journalists little more time than rewriting "news releases." The bean counters further compromise the product by stunting any attempt at newsgathering with a very real conflict of interest that comes from the advertising department personnel far too close and protective of those who are the subject of much of that news and who also contribute to that all-powerful bottom line.

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