Almost All Newspapers Have Reporters That Are Smarter than They Are

Apropos of Felix Salmon:

Three takes on JP Morgan and Madoff: [T]urn to the Huffington Post, where Peter Goodman has recently taken over as business editor after leaving the NYT. His headline is stark — “Bernie Madoff’s Relationship With JPMorgan Should Shock No One” — and, freed from the institutional constraints of the NYT, he lets loose:

Far from shocking, this is really just an appropriate plotline in a story that is finally becoming clear beyond argument: Those lines between criminal fraud and legitimate banking have been blurry for a long time. One can reasonably argue that they pretty much got erased during the Internet bubble and into the real-estate boom.

Goodman goes on to compare JPM unfavorably to Madoff.... Clearly, Goodman is enjoying his newfound freedom at HuffPo — the fact that he can write the kind of material which would be unthankable in the blogs or pages of the NYT. But at the same time, as journalists move back and forth with increasing regularity between mainstream outlets and newer, more vivacious sites, it’s going to be harder for the MSM to hold on to its ability to stay above the fray. Goodman was writing Henriques-style reports only a few months ago, and now that he’s left, it’s pretty clear what he was thinking all along. The same can be said for other NYT departures, like say David Cay Johnston.

The more that this kind of thing happens, the more obvious it becomes that NYT reporters are uncomfortably hiding their opinions, inevitably letting them seep out the edges of their reporting, and at the same time desperately trying to maintain a veneer of impartiality and objectivity. It’s a tough act to maintain, and it shatters completely if and when the NYT’s bylines regularly appear elsewhere expressing strongly-held and even extreme opinions.

The world of journalism is becoming increasingly personality-based, with copper-bottomed institutions being replaced by a multitude of individual voices.... [T]he wall between news and commentary... has... already been breached by having reporters like Gretchen Morgenson also write columns. And in coming years I expect we’ll see much more voice and opinion in news articles, if only because that’s the best way of getting the best content out of the NYT’s smartest reporters.

A correspondent emails:

It's not that the NYT will no longer be impartial: it is that the NYT will--if it manages the transition well--be smart. It has long been obvious that the NYT and the WP have reporters who are much, much smarter than their editors let them be in print: people whom you learn a lot from talking to and only a little from reading what they write. The fact that this gap has recently yawned wider in the WSJ and the Economist is a worrisome trend...