Sir Harold Evans On The Failures Of Journalism

Matt Wells spoke to Sir Harold Evans in New York:

As Editor of the Sunday Times, you helped make it distinctive by giving it a strong investigative arm. Do you see that kind of strength in reporting and in news outlets these days? And what thoughts have you about whether the shift towards online journalism creates a pressure against that or limits that in any way?

There has been a reduction in the amount of long-form investigative journalism and that’s a great pity because some stories actually need space to investigate and put the qualifications in, and so I regret that to some extent – to a large extent, in fact. It can be done online, I mean the Daily Beast [edited by Sir Harold’s wife, Tina Brown] does some, but generally speaking the longer forms of journalism are more suitable to print than to the web.

Generally, when we are on the web we are in a hurry. I think they are complementary; you need both.

Written by Matthew Wells – Journalist.