More questions: inevitable constraints of journalism?

Last week I spoke with WBEZ’s Torey Malatia about the station’s Pritzker Fellowship program whose first two fellows, nominated by community organizations, will soon begin intensive practice at the station.  Malatia said one of his hopes for the program was to counteract a dynamic where reporters would hit up the same sources again and again for recent developments in areas of ongoing coverage such as CHA tenant issues.  Perhaps, he said, bringing in reporters from different communities or without the training and mentality that comes with a j-school education, would lead to more varied sourcing or different ways of approaching, framing or identifying a story.

One thing that I thought was particularly interesting about Malatia’s analysis of the shortcomings of WBEZ’s reporting was that tight deadlines led reporters to go to the database for sources rather than finding new sources or framings for the story.  This led me to two questions: is there a way to alleviate some of the pressures of deadlines or is this an inevitable constraint of journalism?  Do newsrooms have to make a trade-off between timely coverage of news and in-depth reporting?  How much time does it take to prepare a segment on a show like 848 anyway?  Could someone develop a database that helped avoid using the same sources over and over or helped reporters find the most relevant sources?

Photo by tronixstuff via Flickr.