NewsBeat

14 NewsBeat February 2017 How resource-strapped newsrooms still produce high-quality journalism t's an article of faith in the local media business: High-quality content is our trump card in the high-stakes business of attracting and monetizing digital audiences. But how much of that high-quality content do we really produce? And how much of it really has the huge audience pulling-power we need? It's the same answer for both questions: not nearly enough. Every small newspaper can find a story inside the local courtroom. Day in and day out, little "Big-J" journalism is created in most newsrooms. The large majority of what we like to call "quality content" tends to be fairly routine coverage of fairly routine community events, government meetings, and crime. This is nothing new. Newsrooms have always tended to focus on the standard fare of community life as the most dependable means of generating enough content for a day's news budget. It's getting worse But the amount of in-depth reporting is shrinking still further as our revenues — and, therefore, our staffs — shrink. Investigative reporting takes time. And when we do take the time to do investigative reporting, we need to choose our subjects carefully. We need topics that touch or interest broad swathes of the population, or our investments of time may not pay off in big audiences. What do I mean by Big-J journalism? I mean the kind of reporting that smokes out wrongdoing; holds people accountable; breaks open misfeasance; malfeasance, and non-feasance in government; reveals patterns of abuse; and so on. A project for every community However, my purpose here isn't to go banging on about the need for this stuff. Rather, it's to share a "you-can-do-it" example of Big-J journalism even very small staffs can take on. This comes from my days as editor at my family's newspaper in Monroe, Michigan. And it goes way back, before the Internet, social media, and e-mail. That doesn't matter. This idea is as good now as it was then. I hit on the idea one day as I was thinking about our local judges. As in most communities, once judges got elected in Monroe, they would be re-elected over and over again for as long as they chose to run. I asked myself why. Well, because each judge's daily work was mostly invisible to voters. We did routine court coverage and covered major trials, but none of this revealed much about the quality of the judges' work. They reigned supreme in their individual courtrooms, where few voters ever went. There was no mechanism of accountability. I wondered what we could do about that. If only we could watch them work, day in and day out, we could inform voters on how they did their jobs. But that was flat-out impossible with our little staff of five reporters. Getting the job done But then it occurred to me there were people who were in those courtrooms every day, and whose training in law made them qualified observers: the local lawyers. They handled cases every day, and they knew the judges' strengths and weaknesses from personal observation and experience. How could we tap into their knowledge? I huddled with our excellent county government reporter, Charlie Slat, and we came I By STEVE GRAY

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