Oh, what a joy to see great journalism staying alive and well.  As a ’73 alum of the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and having grown up with and around great journalism and journalists, it was a kick to see this story posted today on the American Journalism Review.  The more so since it bodes well for that thing I so want us to be up to our earlobes in—an Age of Transparency and Accountability.

The nutshell is that Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc., which owns well over a hundred publications in 23 states, has established the Elite Reporting Fellowship program, making it possible for reporters in their small papers to do in-depth reporting on big issues.  As much as investigative reporting has been cut back in the large papers, it’s great to see CNHI come up with a way to both promote in-depth reporting and boost the relevance of small papers at the same time.  It’s also great to see reporters in small papers having the opportunity to work on the kind of big stories that have usually been beyond their reach.

How all of this intersects with the issue at hand—transparency and accountability in bureaucracy—is very heartening as well.

The stories have a national focus but also “a direct relevancy to communities,” Ketter says. Extensive original reporting on national trends is a hallmark of the stories, but an emphasis on human interest is clear. Each piece has a well-defined cast of regular people to put a human face on the numbers.

This, to my admittedly limited view, is what’s missing from much of the online citizen journalism  that has been picking up some of the slack created by mainstream media’s cutbacks on in-depth reporting.   Bloggers and independent online news outlets are doing a great job of staying on top of a lot of very important issues, working to keep people in power honest or at least accountable.

But for whatever reasons, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of human interest stories online. Again, from my limited view.  If they’re out there I haven’t been finding them.  Maybe it has to do with the short attention span we have for most web pages.   Maybe so many people are putting their own stories online that hardly anyone thinks of writing someone else’s story online.  We have tons of flash graphics and endless celebrity gossip and unimaginable numbers of readers’ comments—but not a lot of human interest stories.

Here’s to CNHI and the Elite Reporting Fellowship, putting faces on the problems and solutions it reports on, and doing its part for the Age of Transparency.  And maybe there will be more human interest stories popping up here someday, too—and not just Dad’s old columns, master though he was of human interest stories.

Peace.

Deborah Alicen