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Talking back to Wall Street

© Daryl Lease

Almost two months have passed since Jay Harris resigned as publisher of the San Jose Mercury News to protest Knight Ridder's massive budget cuts. And around the nation, the layoffs and frenzied bean-counting continue at newspapers owned by Knight Ridder, The New York Times and others.

The upheaval has prompted some industry heavyweights, including folks at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, the Poynter Institute and the Knight Foundation, to question whether the budget moves are serving Wall Street at the expense of the long-term health of journalism.

Geneva Overholser, a former Des Moines Register editor and Washington Post ombudsman, recently e-mailed colleagues around the country asking them what they could do to raise alarms about what's happening at many U.S. newspapers.

"We all agreed," Bob Giles of Harvard's Nieman Foundation told the Boston Globe, "that Jay's resignation was a very important moment that we needed to seize in order to begin to educate the public about the nature of newspaper profits and the influence of Wall Street on corporate profit goals."

Out of that discussion was born an informal group dubbed the Alliance for Journalism. Participants are actively soliciting information from reporters and editors about the effects of budget cutbacks on newsrooms and the quality of their work.

To find out more about the effort, visit the Poynter Institute at http://www.poynter.org/centerpiece/04230... or the Committee of Concerned Journalists at http://www.journalism.org/ccj/resources/...

For news coverage of the alliance's effort, visit this link at the Boston Globe's Web site: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/122/li...