I’m going to immediately contradict my criticism in the previous post and note that, despite their flaws, newspapers are driving the anthrax story. At the moment, only papers have the wherewithal – the combination of experience and smarts, contacts within the law enforcement and bioterrorism prevention establishment, and the resources required – to assemble this kind of complicated story, fast. In addition, the form the “story” itself doesn’t benefit from the Internet’s inevitable fragmentation, but from aggregation – putting everything together into a comprehensible form. Not necessarily a single narrative (though I’d like to see that) but a form that still lays it all out.
Scoop-driven network TV news isn’t going to do it. New online outlets such as ProPublica might be able to, but there aren’t many of them. Blogs and social media are at a disadvantage negotiating this kind of secretive, highly specialized milieu.
As newspapers implode and inevitably shed investigative capacity, it’s going to be harder for them to mount this kind of effort. We need to cultivate the kind of talent and narrative forms required to replace that in the new media universe.
