J. TODD FOSTER: Newspapers’ Death Would Kill Investigative Reporting

Last week’s column was sort of a futuristic allegory, an ominous harbinger of the fate awaiting newspapers – and our society. This week’s column is about why none of us can afford to let it happen.

While many of us get our first dose of breaking news on the Internet, the Web rarely reports, edits and produces that news. That duty falls primarily to newspapers and, to a lesser extent, local television and radio. The Web simply regurgitates what other outlets produce or is the platform that newspapers use to get the story out in real time.

When or if the day comes that we must depend on the Web solely for journalism, there will be a few quality online sites – mostly national newspapers or magazines operating in New York and Washington, D.C. Our world and state capitals probably would be covered by a decent cadre of journalists employed by Web sites.

But a team of Internet reporters would not be unleashed on cities like our Bristols to cover city council and school board meetings, youth sports or nonprofit groups. True, you would get breaking news of crime and accidents and rewrites of governmental and corporate press releases here. And even in Bristol there will be bloggers – some intelligent and qualified – to comment on the day’s news.

But those bloggers would have nothing to blog about without the presence of local news generated primarily by a newspaper.

Bringing you that news is expensive: Who can afford to pay a reporter to attend a five-hour Sullivan County Commission meeting? You can ask that question of any locale, and the answer, so far in our nation’s history anyway, is: the newspaper.

The worst thing missing from our society, however, should a newspaperless existence befall us is the end of local investigative reporting as we know it.

How would that manifest itself? Here’s a recent example: You would not have seen a two-day, three-story package this newspaper published last Sunday and Monday on an attorney who preyed sexually on indigent women clients. Investigative reporter Daniel Gilbert spent months on that story, tracking down these women, convincing them to tell their stories, interviewing legal experts, researching bar associations in all 50 states and grilling authorities about their handling of the case.

It was a monumental story that strikes at the heart of what we do as journalists: comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Without newspapers and investigative reporting, there will be no checks and balances against powerful, monied interests. Underdogs would have no allies. There would be no one to hear the blowing of whistles.

Some of the most gratifying telephone calls I’ve received in years have come in recent months from senior citizens who have lived here and subscribed to the Herald Courier for generations. They had never called the newspaper before except to report missed papers. But they wanted us to know how much they appreciate our investigative reporting and our watchdog role.

Not every reader understands that type of reporting. After we published the package called “Breach of Trust” about the wayward attorney who, at best, had sex with his clients and, at worst, allegedly raped two of them, a woman reader e-mailed reporter Gilbert.

“Do you not even think before you wrote such sexual material about a person if his or her children is going to read this and the impact it will have on these children, you should be got for something for hurting his children like this ...,” she wrote.

The newspaper version of this story was G-rated. The official court records we posted online with the story show the salacious nature of this lawyer’s conduct. We spared our readers from that in the print edition but made those records available to online readers with a stern warning about graphic content. Those records were generated through tax dollars and are in the public domain; we believed they should be made available to those readers who wanted to check our reporting with the primary source materials.

Secondly, I dare say we showed more regard for the lawyer’s family than he did while spending years preying on vulnerable women he represented in divorce and child custody matters.

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at or (276) 645-2513.