Here's a sad but true story about the slow death of editing in our nation's newspapers.
When I'm not writing books my day job is as an editor for a major wire service. I spend my time trimming extraneous words, turning passives into actives, shortening sentences, unburying buried leads and generally making stories flow better, become more readable, more logical, more rigorous. If sourcing is insufficient, I insist on more sources. If a story is biased, I make it balanced. I also often catch errors. As any honest reporter or novelist will tell you, the world needs editors.Yet in our new Internet world, where everything is speed, where accuracy is not particularly valued, these skills seem ever less appreciated.
Call me old-fashioned but accuracy is more important than speed. There's no point being first with the story if you're also wrong. False information, even if traders can make money on it, is ultimately useless. I wish the world would realize this.

The newspaper industry, the business in which I have made a living for the past 30 years, is facing terrible times. Some believe it is in a death spiral. The New York Times was the latest industry bellwether to post a loss this week.
The problem is of course newspapers haven't figured out a way of competing with the Internet. Young people no longer buy newspapers -- they get their news free online. But advertising rates on the Internet are a fraction of what they are in the newspapers. As a result, circulation is falling, advertising rates are falling and newspapers are forced to cut costs. That means cutting staff, which results in a poorer product which in turn leads to falling circulation.
Add to that the recession and what you have is a short, medium and long-term crisis.
The Times saw advertising revenue fall 10.6 percent in the first quarter. Across the industry, newspaper ad revenue fell almost 8 percent last year, the second-worst decline in more than half a century, according to the Newspaper Association of America. At the Tribune company which owns the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and many other venerable brands, things are dire.
What's sad about all this is we really need newspapers for the health of our democracy. Internet journalism and blogging do not replace the breadth and depth of coverage provided by the great newspapers in their heyday and still provided by The New York Times, Washington Post and a few others. What the blogosphere offers is lots of chatter, catty gossip, some niche reporting and much so-called analysis -- but little solid investigative reporting. We are becoming more and more a celebrity-driven society. Already, newspapers and TV have cut their foreign news coverage drastically, closing foreign bureaus, making us even more insular and ignorant of the world.
Of course there are positives about the Internet. It has made us reporters more accountable, we are more in touch with and responsive to our readers, it's made research easier and given everyone the ability to be heard. News is now much faster than ever before. I'm not suggesting going back. But we still need solid editorial standards, fact-checking, accuracy and accountability and the Internet does not provide those things. Above all, we need good investigative journalism which requires time, patience and lots of money. All of these things are in short supply nowadays.
Many, perhaps even most newspapers in the United States will not survive in their current form. They will become stripped down freebies given away at subway stations. The country will miss them once they're gone.

A good friend and a great reporter, Jack McWethy, died yesterday aged 61 in an awful skiing accident.

Jack was one of the band of brothers and sisters who covered the State Department in the momentous years of the late 1980s and early 1990s when the Cold War ended.
I'm too broken up to write more now but I'm posting another tribute by one of Jack's many friends and admirers.

Jack McWethy: All about the Why
By Bob Steele (more by author) Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values
Jack McWethy was a journalist’s journalist. Skilled, savvy, smart. In fact he was exceptionally skilled, really savvy and one of the smartest people you’d ever meet. Jack died Wednesday in a skiing accident in Colorado.Jack’s death breaks my heart. It also prompts me to remember how well he lived; how much he contributed; how much integrity he had.

The public knew him as John McWethy, the veteran, chief national security and State Department correspondent for ABC News. He traveled the globe covering diplomacy, détente and death. He intensely interviewed government leaders and he reported from battlegrounds all over the world. On 9/11, he was inside the Pentagon when that terrorist-piloted airplane knifed into the building. He stayed at his post for hours; his cool, professional reporting a hallmark of journalism’s essential role that fateful day.

What the public didn’t see was Jack mentoring students at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, our alma mater. He would go back to campus to work with the next generation of journalists. Dressed in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, he would hunker down with the reporters and editors at the school newspaper and the radio station. About reporting. About interviewing. About storytelling. About ethics.Most importantly, Jack would ask them questions. Lots and lots of questions.
As a journalist, Jack McWethy was passionate about the journalistic responsibility of “holding the powerful accountable.” He had no hubris. He was not arrogant. He practiced serious, substantive journalism. He was ethical and excellent.As ABC News President David Westin said about Jack, “He was one of those very rare reporters who knew his beat better than anyone, and had developed more sources than anyone, and yet, kept his objectivity…Jack’s work made the people he covered value him, respect him, and always know that he would keep them honest.” In 2003, Jack was the commencement speaker at DePauw University.
In his address to the graduates, he used a word that epitomized his approach to journalism and to life. "The word 'why' is, in my view, the most powerful word in the English language. It is the driving force of my profession, and it's also the driving force and at the heart of your professors, creative sciences, honest politicians, and of good parents,” McWethy said.“Don't stop asking the word 'why' just because you're leaving DePauw. All institutions, all endeavors, all relationships are improved by a good scrubbing using the word 'why.' In democracy it is the question we must all constantly be asking our government and our leaders. It is not unpatriotic to question the government; it is unpatriotic not to
There is profound sadness in losing Jack McWethy. He made a difference, a really big difference in all of our lives.Jack McWethy had integrity.

Today I celebrated the 28th anniversary of my first day with Reuters.

I dug out my very first press card -- I look like a child.

I read a lovely paragraph on a New York Times blog by Judith Warner.

Here's the paragraph that grabbed me:

"It's inevitable, in the forward march of our lives that whole worlds we have loved will be left behind. It's one of the shocks of middle age: your present tense becomes the past. But did the present always seem so inexorably to pass one by? Was there a way, in the past, to slow time down and resist the maddening speed of keeping up and getting by?"