The folks at Nieman have added a program to Public Radio Exchange on rehabbing our business. Here's the description: "Rehabbing the Fourth Estate" is a broadcast special from the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. It is hosted by Christopher Lydon. Every year the Program hosts a conference where a thousand working journalists come to Cambridge for one of the largest annual meetings of the journalist community. Harvard's annual journalism conference felt different in 2005. It's always a long weekend conference on the craft of narrative writing. This year it wasn't shoptalk or method, it was more of an examination of an institution. A lot of the talk in fact was of a profession in decline, of a media cowed, incurious and ineffective. The old pros and newfangled bloggers both are feeling the slump of an institution gone soft. Many wonder if the standards of fairness, balance and objectivity even apply anymore. Not that they're ready to take the wrecking ball to the Fourth Estate yet--journalists are wondering if the gated community their profession has become can be the scrappy frontier it once was. Register then listen here.
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