Whatever their personal politics, the shambles of the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq makes journalists uncomfortable. In the aftermath of September 11—with such experienced stalwarts as Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney at the helm—the consensus was that the White House team knew what it was doing in the War on Terror. Skepticism was confined to the inside pages of newspapers and to pundits whose judgment was deemed more about reflex than strategy. But as the situation, particularly in Iraq, has deteriorated, journalism, especially by newspaper and magazine reporters in a succession of best-selling books, has provided a portrait of what went wrong and why that is both brilliant as a display of craft and very disturbing for what it reveals about the way we went to war.

Any list risks inadvertent omissions. But here are notable books by reporters just based on their work at the Washington Post: Steve Coll’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Ghost Wars focusing on Afghanistan; Anthony Shadid’s  Night Draws Near based on Iraq reporting for which he won a Pulitzer; Thomas B. Ricks’ Fiasco; Rajiv Chandrasekan’s Imperial Life in The Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, which has received a National Book Award nomination; Karen DeYoung’s Soldier, a biography of  Powell;  and, of course, Bob Woodward’s State of Denial.

The obvious point is that journalism at its best, especially that coming from reporters who work at our leading newspapers and magazines, is as I wrote some months ago, “a priceless asset.” But there is a more complex issue: What does that kind of journalism have to offer to the future of our newspapers and news magazines? The conventional wisdom is that the business models for traditional print journalism are in disarray. Whatever the problems of transition to a digital world, the prevailing view  is way too pessimistic. Newspapers are still solidly profitable. The New Yorker, whose writers on Iraq and terrorism, including George Packer, Jon Lee Anderson, and Lawrence Wright, are among the best, has gone in recent years from losing millions of dollars to being, by all accounts, an earner for Conde Nast by investing in itself on both the content and business sides.

So here’s a suggestion that the writers and most of their literary agents will greet warily, at best: the owners and editors of our newspapers and magazines, which support all these reporters in getting the material they turn into books, should align themselves with that process and secure benefits both financial and for their brands from the results. Newspapers have a tentative and occasionally capricious attitude towards this issue (“You get paid leave. . . . You don’t”). The Wall Street Journal has a program for supporting some reporters in book projects and sharing in the proceeds. The Washington Post has sabbaticals for book writing with reduced salary and, I believe, first refusal to excerpt the results. The New York Times says that books resulting from work for the paper should be offered to its book publishing affiliate, but does not have to be published there.

The critical and commercial success of all the books related to Iraq, terror, and Afghanistan are a good reason for careful consideration of how the publications and the writers can take greater advantage of their respective commitment to journalism and the revenue that supports it. The concept of multi-platform distribution of information is central to the evolving news business. So is the awareness of leading publications that their brand names are valuable and can be leveraged in ways well beyond the daily or weekly output of printed pages. I can assure you that this represents a significant change of attitude.

In the early 1990s, I was the publisher of Times Books at Random House. Although this was a spin-off of the New York Times, the newspaper could not have cared less about its relationship to the books published at Times Books (except for the money spinning recycling of crossword puzzles). Times Books was considered a nuisance by newspaper management because reporters wanted to sell their work (even that generated by their work at the New York Times) to the highest bidder rather than be shepherded into what everyone considered a backwater. Times Books made its own way publishing authors such as Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, and Robert McNamara. But the paper was contemptuous of Times Books as a means of branding.

One of the few Times Books-related projects around when I took over the nearly empty cupboard, was entitled The New York Times Guide to Personal Finance in the 1990s by Gary Klott, then a business news columnist. When Klott left the paper, the New York Times editors insisted that we put a disclaimer on the title page saying that despite the title, the New York Times took no responsibility for the contents of the book. Our solution (hilarious, in retrospect, and a complete bust) was to call the book the Gary Klott Guide to Personal Finance in the 1990s. Klott has since died and I apologize to his descendents for making fun of his completely respectable book.

Today, the New York Times has an aggressive branding program at Times Books, which is now part of the Holtzbrink book companies. It markets Times Books with advertising, special promotions, and public appearances by the authors. Overall, the New York Times today recognizes that its name is one of its most important attributes and its licensing activities are extensive and the company negotiators determined to extract every penny of benefit, as they should.

The publishers of books that are so critical now in telling the story of Iraq, for example, pay advances to the authors, but they do not give them the training, credibility, and access that their publications do. Great journalism, great books, and great newspapers depend on each other. They should find a way to work together for the benefit of all concerned—for the purpose, most importantly, of keeping a penetrating eye on the policymakers of war and national security.