Arts and education reporters recently teamed up to tackle the controversy over the ouster of the RISD Museum director; several desks provided pieces for a multi-part series examining the use of stimulus funds in the state; and a paper that might have looked at municipal contract squabbles in isolation under the old bureau system recently produced a trend piece on unions forced to make concessions in tough times.
The ProJo, which has also strived to put more of the quirky and colorful on the front page, is in many ways a more interesting read than it was a year ago. But the transition to a new sort of journalism is not complete.
For all the contextual work, there is still plenty in the way of narrowly tailored stories on local sewage plants or budget resolutions — sometimes of interest to a statewide audience, but often of limited value.
Indeed, while other papers lean more and more on analysis in a bid to stay relevant in a 24-hour news cycle — the Boston Globe recently ran an amusing piece on the hubbub over a Harvard Yard clothing line and turned Red Sox announcer Jerry Remy's return from cancer and depression into a piece on the psychological toll of illness — the ProJo still appears a gray document at times.
And there are barriers to improvement. Several of the paper's most experienced reporters and editors and columnists — those best positioned to connect the dots — left amid the buyouts and layoffs of the fall and a subsequent round of cuts in the spring.
And pulling reporters back from the zoning and school board meetings can make it harder to produce a more meaningful journalism. "The insight to do a good interpretive piece or the leads to do an investigative story often comes out of the nuts and bolts work," said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school in St. Petersburg, Florida.
'THAT'S NOT ME'
But depth is about more than trend-spotting and nuanced reporting. It is also about taking the full measure of a community. Putting out a paper that reflects the readers' interest in science and business and theater. And metropolitan dailies, forced to cut somewhere, have taken the ax to this sort of "niche" reporting first.
Newspapers in Tampa, Atlanta, and Denver have dropped film critics in recent years. The Los Angeles Times has jettisoned its standalone business section. And the Boston Globe is the latest to cut its science section.
The ProJo, for its part, still has its share of theater and music reviews. But much of the paper's specialized reporting has melted away. The commitment to book reviews has waned. The paper has dropped most of its in-house Celtics and Bruins coverage.
One-time television reporter Andy Smith has moved to the business desk. And after last month's redesign, the business page is no more, with corporate and consumer reporting now spread throughout the local and national news sections.
Editors at newspapers across the country say their readers can get movie reviews and the latest on forensic science elsewhere. And they're right. But dropping niche coverage and de-emphasizing national and international reporting can ultimately alienate a local audience with broad interests.
"People look at the paper and say, 'That's not me,' " said Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Of course, a more cosmopolitan newspaper may be an impossibility in an era of diminished resources. And it may not even make sense in what Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at New York University and writes the blog PressThink, calls an "unbundled" era.
For every traditional newspaper reader who wants a comprehensive broadsheet that reflects his interests, there is a next-generation consumer who is looking for specialized reports on skiing conditions and the local music scene and the elementary school down the street — the sort of hyper-local coverage that is beyond the means of a slimmed-down newspaper, but readily available on various niche web sites.
And that leaves the modern metropolitan paper in what may be an untenable position: it is too local for some and not local enough for others.
The denizens of Fountain Street are aware of this conundrum. Aware of the paper's financial woes. But most say they are proud of what the paper is doing with a smaller staff. Pleased that the ProJo is trying to adapt to the new reality, however imperfectly.
And that may the best a metro daily, circa 2009, can do.
"At least the paper isn't standing still," said one newsroom source. "If we're dying, we're going to put up a fight."
David Scharfenberg can be reached at dscharfenberg@thephoenix.com.
