Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/250528
hear them on FPL, and on our website," he says. Te 31-year-old journalist with bright blue eyes and a fondness for the word "stellar" has been traveling the state, talking to editors about collaborative opportunities and learning which stories matter to Kentuckians. "I've been kind of moving around the state, meeting with lots of folks, doing a listening tour of what the community wants and needs," McCarthy says. "I've tipped back a lot of beers, and I ask everyone: How do you get your media? Do you read the phone? Do you listen to the radio? I really like trying to understand the folks in Kentucky." Tis editor/manager/public-liaison role is new for McCarthy. Until a year ago, he was in newspapers, most recently the New Orleans the norm for most newspaper and television reporters, when traditionally there has been a place for more long-range reporting. As the Internet undermined traditional news media, the commitment to such time-consuming work evaporated in many newsrooms. Mark Schaver was the digital editor at the Courier-Journal before he took a $10,000 pay cut to work at the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. "It was not fun working (at the C-J) anymore," Schaver says. He had been there more than 20 years. "I was tired of managing decline." Schaver had been director of a computer-assisted reporting team at the Courier, but when downsizing began around 2008, he had to take on more duties. Computer-assisted reporting, nity. Why not take your life and throw it up in the air?" David Hawpe, retired longtime editor and opinion-page director at the CourierJournal, who spent most of his life in Louisville journalism, says the development of investigative-reporting centers such as the one at LPM makes sense. "I think this is happening in lots of places around the country as existing mainstream media — i.e., newspapers — come under pressure from the emergence of new platforms," Hawpe says. LPM, Time-Warner's cn|2, the businessoriented news website Insider Louisville, and others like them are almost inevitable. "Tis is, in a way, sort of what capitalism is about, when they talk about creative destruction," "I thought, if we nurtured (an investigative team), we already have the 501c3. We already have the building. We already have the fundraising structure. Maybe we can make this work within Louisville Public Media," recalls LPM head Donovan Reynolds. Times-Picayune, where his work was a fnalist for a 2009 Pulitzer. Ten, the New Orleans CBS television afliate invited him to join its staf — an invitation almost unimaginable until recent years. "It was a big deal. It got noted in all the trade magazines, just like the Bill Lamb move," he says, referring to the WDRB president and general manager's hiring of Courier-Journal sportswriters Rick Bozich and Eric Crawford in 2012. "Te CBS station approached and said, 'Come on and be an investigative reporter. Come in and just do what you do. Just get great stories.' It was a stellar job," he says. "I really got to do the kind of stellar investigative reporting we expect in newspapers." He hadn't planned to enter management, but when he heard about the LPM opening, it triggered memories of nights in the bar when he and reporting colleagues would sketch the perfect news operation on cocktail napkins. "I told Donovan Reynolds that this is damn near the closest thing" to the news operation he imagined, McCarthy says. "I mean, where else can you fnd a newsroom like this, where there's not a lot of pressure to produce every day?" A focus on production is 50 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 2.14 which involves digging into publically available data, is an important investigative tool. By the time he left the paper last summer, no one was doing computer-assisted reporting. Te loss of in-depth coverage, not only at the Courier but at newspapers across the country, has left niches for emerging news outlets to fll, including those at LPM. "If you're a serious news reader, and you're following what's happening in Louisville, and you're only reading the C-J, you're not getting much news," Schaver says. "Tere's a lot of news that's broken by a lot of other outlets now." Before the investigative center job came up, as his role at the Courier-Journal morphed, Schaver, 52, began a quest to enter the foreign service in 2010. "It's a long, arduous process, and you never know if you're going to get a job ofer," he says. He had stopped expecting one. Ten, on Christmas Eve, the State Department called, and he left LPM in January to begin training. He says his decision to take the foreign service job was not a comment on LPM. "I like it here. I love it here. I have no complaints," he says. "But this, it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportu- Hawpe says. "An old paradigm comes apart and a new paradigm emerges, and it's out of the competitive that this occurs." But unlike some of the other emerging news providers, McCarthy doesn't view the LPM investigative team as a competitor to local news media. He sees other media as potential partners. Te collaboration with the News and Tribune on the Hooten story is, he hopes, the frst of several. But wooing bigger collaborators may prove more difcult. "I applaud anybody who is doing anything trying to bring more news coverage," says WDRB's Lamb. "Louisville Public Media and WDRB are the only two organizations that I'm aware of that are actually investing in journalism and growing their news capacity — everyone else is maintaining or declining. I give them high marks for doing something that certainly not many radio companies are doing." Te year after Lamb hired Bozich and Crawford, he took on three more Courier-Journal reporters — Jason Riley, Marcus Green and Chris Otts, the last of whom had recently left the Courier to research local employment issues for the city's workforce development organization.