Ch 3 Modern press

Ernie Pyle, US correspondent in WWII, whose human, patriotic, critical style was widely emulated.

  1. This chapter focuses on the 20th century print media and the 21st century impacts of the digital revolution on print media. Two selections from this chapter are in the Features section:  E.W. Scripps and Science, and Who Killed the American Newspaper?
  2. Two sections on content are also provided for this section:  Muckrakers & civil rights, and Science & environmental journalism.

Discussion questions

  1. An older generation’s voice:  What was Will Irwin on about when he talked about newspapers speaking with the voice of an older generation? Have you heard this sort of criticism about other media in the modern era? Compare what Irwin had to say with the last post by Austin Tice, the US journalist missing in Syria in August, 2012.
  2. Roosevelt on Muckraking:  Teddy Roosevelt encouraged the muckrakers before he became president, but afterwards warned that they were going too far. Why do you suppose he took that position?
  3. Wartime censorship:  What is the danger of wartime censorship, according to George Seldes?  How was wartime censorship different in WWI than it was in WWII?
  4. Lenin and Gandhi:  How did attitudes towards freedom of speech reflect larger differences between the revolutions in Russia (led by Vladimir Lenin) and India (led by Mohandas Gandhi)?
  5. Adversarial press:  Many conservatives think that Richard Nixon was treated unfairly during the Watergate scandal and that the media lost the war in Vietnam.  What evidence can you present on both sides of these arguments?
  6. Digital revolution: How well did American newspapers deal with the advent of computer networks?

People & Events

Will Irwin, Richard Harding Davis, Ida B. Wells, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Lincoln Steffens, Cecil Chesterton, Ida Tarell, David Graham Phillips, Upton Sinclair, Bolo Pasha, George Seldes, John Reed, Frederick Douglass, John H. Johnson, Ralph McGill, Homer Bigart, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, John Hershey

Documentary videos

  1. Soldiers without swords — The Black Press Excellent and eye-opening PBS documentary series.
  2. Dawn’s Early Light — An insightful documentary about Atlanta Journal editor Ralph McGill and the struggle to report the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s.   The video, produced in the 1970s, is a good companion to the Gene Roberts / Hank Klibanoff book, The Race Beat. A Cspan video of a Gene Roberts discussion about the book is also available.
  3. Journalism :  Burton Holmes Films,  (1940) — A free downloadable film originally made for high school students about the kind of work that journalists do.  Interesting from an historical perspective.
  4. Journalists Killed in the Line of Duty  (2005). News anchors Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite narrate this remarkable documentary that chronicles the deaths of seven journalists, including The Wall Street Journal‘s Daniel Pearl and NBC correspondent David Bloom.
  5. Page One: Inside the New York Times (2011) is a somewhat quirky documentary about the Times that faces, as a Washington Post critic says, the cold hard reality of the declining newspaper business.

EThics and social responsibility

Hutchins (1947), MacBride (1980), and Miller (2010) Commissions

  1. Hutchins, Robert M. Chair, the Commission on Freedom of the Press. A Free and Responsible Press: A General Report on Mass Communication: Newspapers, Radio, Motion Pictures, Magazines, and Books, University of Chicago, 1947. Full report on the web here.
  2. Hutchins Commission:  Main points
  3.  Realigning Journalism with Democracy: The Hutchins Commission: Its Times and Ours   
  4. E.B. White wrote in 1976 about “sponsored” articles and why they were a bad idea.  He said:   A funded assignment is a tempting dish for a writer, who may pocket a much larger fee than he is accustomed to getting. And sponsorship is attractive to the sponsor himself, who, for one reason or another, feels an urge to penetrate the editorial columns after being so long pent up in the advertising pages. These temptations are real, and if the barriers were to be let down I believe corruption and abuse would soon follow.” This is all the more significant in a digital information environment. 
  5. MacBride Commission, 1980: Many Voices, One World
  6. Miller Commission, March 2010: Old Media, New Media and the Challenge to Democratic Governance

 Ethics and new media

  1. “Two Visions of Responsibility: How National Commissions Contributed to Journalism Ethics, 1963-1975.” It wasn’t just the work of the Hutchins Commission that changed the way journalists saw the ethical boundaries of their work. There were also a number of commissions on violence in the 1963-75 time frame, and the media responded with revisions of codes of ethics, the creation of news councils and journalism reviews, and increased employment of minorities.
  2. We’re all journalists now. But what about ethics?  By Doug Todd, Vancouver Sun, July 1, 2012.
  3. A growing void where facts were once checked.  Alan Cowell, New York Times, Nov. 19, 2012. Cowell discusses the implications of direct tweeting of the Gaza conflict of 2012.

 STRUCTURE, collapse and new media 

 The end of the print media

  1. The ghost of the Herald Tribune — Great 1987 article by Richard Reeves,  about the collapse of the New York newspaper in 1966 and its 100th anniversary of its Paris edition.
  2. Online media is replacing newspapers and TV. Is that a bad thing?  Christian Science Monitor.
  3. The 1960s redesign:  Newspaper editors were glacially slow to change how they did things, largely because for 50 years their newspapers had faced little competition in reporting day-to-day events — and had enjoyed healthy profits. News people came to see the way they did things as the right way, as good journalism. They came to believe that the news process, an irrational one in many ways, was the reason for their success. (Michael O’Donell)
  4. New media meltdown at New Century — Business Week, 1998
  5. Bloggers versus journalists – twisted psychology, false dichotomy. By Jay Rosen.
  6. Will newspaper values ever recover?  — Newsosaur blog.
  7. Rehire The Journalists! Audiences Want More Science
  8. Barbie can be a multimedia journalist
  9. Journalism.org- The State of the News Media 2010
  10. State of the News Media 2010 – Pew Research Center
  11. How the newspaper industry tried to invent the Web but failed. -  Jack Shafer – Slate Magazine, 2009.
  12. Stverak, Jason. “The pros and pros of ‘Citizen Journalism,’ ” Online Journalism Review, March 12, 2010.
  13. Gene Weingarten: How ‘branding’ is ruining journalism
  14. Chris Hedges: The Death of Journalism, June 27, 2011.
  15. Why Are We Still Consuming News Like It’s 1899? By Ben Huh, May 2011, founder of I Can Has Cheeseburger.
  16. Jack Lessenberry, How to kill the news, Sept. 7, 2011. “Reporters should crowdsource, tweet, shoot, SMS, live chat and — oh, yeah — report the news.”
  17. How the Daytona News Journal’s value dropped from $300 million to $20 million between 2006 and 2010.  Alan D. Mutter’s  Newsosaur blog.
  18. World Association of Newspapers presentation on press trends.  Note circulation in the Asia Pacific region was up 15% between 2006 and 2010,  Latin America up 4% since 06, Europe down 10% since 06, but North America down 20 % since 06.
  19. Bulletins from the future:  The internet has turned the news industry upside down, making it more participatory, social, diverse and partisan—as it used to be before the arrival of the mass media, says Tom Standage. Economist, July 7, 2011.
  20. Before Watergate could be Googled. Wall Street Journal, April 16, 2012.
  21. What can Time and Newsweek do about the supposed raison d’etre of the whole weekly news magazine enterprise?  Honestly? Nothing. The “weekly newsmagazine” is an oxymoron. Philadelphia Inquirer, May 14, 2012.
  22. New Orleans Times Picayune goes underwater and is mourned by the New York Times and the  Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2012. Meanwhile Warren Buffett is buying up newspapers for a song.
  23. Tabloids are collapsing in the UK.  NY Times June 4, 2012.
  24. Film on dying newspapers under production.  Politico, June 5, 2012.
  25. “We wont retreat.”  Jim Amos, New Orleans Times Picayune. June 13, 2012.  NPR covers the layoffs of half the newsroom and talks with Mark Schleifstein.   What the future of news looks like.  Poynter Institute, June, 2012.
  26. Sarah Palin is wrong – Citizen journalists can’t replace real journalists.  Leonard Pitts, June 24, 2012.
  27. One reason the news media is collapsing in Australia, New Zealand and Canada is increasing ownership by partisan zealots.
  28. Will investors follow Rupert Murdoch to the newspaper rack? Los Angeles Times,  June 29, 2012.  (Doubtful).
  29. Philadelphia’s “Queen of the Press” (the Inquirer) is deposed.  July 2, 2012.
  30. Journalism can’t survive on symbolic capital alone (such as) grand talk about democracy and the Fourth Estate, says Burt Herman.  “If things that are not journalism (can) entertain, inform and facilitate agency better than things that are, don’t bet on journalism to thrive.” Herman’s blog came up in a Storify thread:  Is journalism being replaced?  
  31. It was a pretty big deal when the New Orleans Times Picayune dropped its daily print edition. But beneath the drama was a quieter question: Does it matter?  (Christian Science Monitor, Nov 11, 2012).

Journalism education

  1. My “Dare to Dream” Journalism Curriculum 
  2. Is it safe to go to journalism school?  — Michael Miner, Chicago Reader
  3. Where is journalism school going? — The Nation Magazine. This is mostly about Northwestern University’s renaming of its J-school to include marketing, but also the breakdown of the wall separating public relations from journalism.
  4. Half-Truths on a J-School – Inside Higher Ed, 2010.

New ideas for publishing

  1. News creation, commentary and dissemination is now participatory – Pew Internet & American Life Project
  2. The Big Thaw – Charting a New Future for Journalism,   a study by Q Media Labs was released by The Media Consortium,  a group of 40  independent media organization such as Mother Jones & The Nation.
  3. How to Save the News -  The Atlantic  James Fallows, June 2010.
  4. It’s time to create an American World Service like the BBC World  Service, says Columbia University President and First Amendment scholar Lee C.  Bollinger in the July/August 2011 issue of Columbia Journalism Review.   “Now, with globalization well underway, it is imperative that we begin to think more systematically about how we will build and develop the concept of a free press for a new global public forum.”
  5. The Washingon  Post re-builds for a different future.  February 12, 2012.  New York Times.
  6. Forbes Magazine is re-inventing the magazine, according to editor Lewis Dvorkin.
  7. And Time Magazine gives the world the same old American fluff.  According to Jon Stewart on Feb. 14, 2012.
  8. Whatever its particular name — new media, citizen journalism, crowd-sourcing — the new model tends to be sold as a panacea for the diseased hulk of traditional journalism. Toronto Star, May 31, 2012.
  9. “We”ll keep delivering” says Nancy Barnes of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
  10. “Espresso” book publishing, Washington Post, June 2012.
  11. Google “Penguin” will flip SEO on its head.  Advertising Age, Aug. 9, 2012
  12. Amazon serials: Part Dickens, part TV, Fast Company, Sept. 7, 2012
  13. Self published books fueling an industry rise (although some are getting left out of promotional events). Des Moines Register Oct. 3.

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