Former editor: Local TV more threatened than newspapers

PHOENIX - As financially troubled as many newspapers are these days, local television news could face a tougher future as newspapers and their larger staffs provide more video via the Web, the former executive editor of The Washington Post said Monday.

"I think there's just as good a chance of local television news disappearing as newspapers disappearing - and probably more of a chance actually," Len Downie Jr. said in an interview with Cronkite News Service.

The Washington Post's Web site provided live webcasts from the national political conventions and will have a live election-night webcast from its newsroom. Its journalists are being trained in multimedia reporting, Downie said.

"A number of our most talented journalists turn out to be very good anchors after never being trained as an anchor at all," Downie said.

The Post has more than 100 reporters covering just the Washington area, while the largest TV station in the market has about a dozen reporters covering the same area, he said.

"As much as newspaper newsrooms are being squeezed, local television newsrooms are being squeezed more," Downie said.

Downie retired last month after 17 years as the Post's top editor and currently serves as vice president at large for The Washington Post Co. He visited Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication for a talk in conjunction with National Freedom of Speech Week.

In the interview, Downie called it ironic that the mainstream media are struggling financially because he said they are practicing better journalism and reaching more people than ever via the Internet.

"The mainstream media is more professional, better educated, held accountable, better than ever before, more transparent, larger audience, than ever before in the history of this country," Downie said.

He said newspapers are becoming more entrepreneurial as they explore ways to make money with their content. The Post, for example, is delivering more news to handheld devices, including an experiment to send updated scores from certain high school football games to people's cell phones.

"The difference is that before we weren't looking for those things," Downie said. "Occasionally we might copy something somebody else did, but now we've got people whose focus is figuring out what the next big thing is for us."

Downie said it's a good thing that anyone can produce journalism as a blogger. In fact, he said, bloggers have broken major stories and have made the mainstream media more accountable.

"There is nothing we can publish now that's false, that's plagiarism - a lot of which happened in the past and you never found out about it," he said. "Nothing like that can happen now without being caught by someone in the blogosphere."

On the presidential election, Downie said news organizations have produced more coverage than ever that explores issues and holds the candidates accountable. Despite occasional protests from the campaigns, particularly that of Republican nominee John McCain, the coverage has been fair, he said.

"They are working the referees," Downie said.

"When you go to a basketball game, you will see those coaches constantly yelling at the referees even when they know the referees' calls are right," he said. "They want to make sure the referees know they are there, and it may help shade the calls in their direction, and that's what I think the McCain campaign's been doing."

Democratic nominee Barack Obama's campaign might do the same thing if it were behind the polls, Downie said.

Photo caption: Len Downie Jr., former executive editor of The Washington Post, answers questions during an interview with Cronkite News Service on Monday, Oct. 20, 2008, in Phoenix. (Cronkite News Service photo/Deanna Dent).