Journalism: January 2008 Archive Page

Great satire from The Onion.

Breaking News: Series Of Concentric Circles Emanating From Glowing Red Dot

When steampunk was speculative fiction, not charmingly retro... Edgar Allan Poe pulbished this mock news story in the New York Sun.

The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a Balloon; and this too without difficulty -- without any great apparent danger -- with thorough control of the machine -- and in the inconceivably brief period of seventy-five hours from shore to shore! By the energy of an agent at Charleston, S.C., we are enabled to be the first to furnish the public with a detailed account of this most extraordinary voyage...

Times Online:

On the evening of Saturday January 17, 1998, the internet gossip merchant Matt Drudge posted a story that opened the most sensational scandal season in the history of the American presidency. He reported that Newsweek magazine had killed a story about President Clinton's sexual relationship with a former intern. The next day he had her name: Monica Lewinsky. The mainstream media were slow to catch up, but by the following Tuesday they were reporting that Clinton was being investigated for encouraging others to lie to cover up the affair.

An opinion published in the Robert Morris University student newspaper:

The purpose of a university newspaper is not to depict students or the school in a negative light, but to talk about positive stories, current events, campus activities etc. Now imagine a high school kid looking to come to RMU, a parent wishing to send his/her daughter here...they decide to pick up the December 12th edition of the sentry...front page..."RMU Student Faces Multiple Drug Charges." What a great way to promote the school! This was in very bad taste for a front page article... Speaking for myself and other students I have spoken to, this is our school and we don't want articles like this on the front page of our school newspaper.

I'm the adviser of Seton Hill University's newspaper, and I don't tell the editor what to publish or where to put the stories. I do confess that I have encouraged them to save their heavy-hitting, critical stories for the issues they publish during the regular semester, and to treat the Summer Orientation issue as an opportunity to build community and recruit new staff members.  So the editor does need to exercise tact. Yet, recently the students published an issue with a front-page article about drug abuse on campus, and the university president said she was proud to distribute it to the board members.

Here's the comment I left on the RMU Sentry's website:

A very important function of a university newspaper -- something that a PR office cannot supply -- is giving students the opportunity to practice journalism. And students cannot practice journalism unless they have the editorial freedom to publish stories that will make some people uncomfortable.  Surely RMU already has a venue for publicizing all the positive stories.

Because the student faces a felony charge, and had already been suspended from classes and kicked out of the dorms as per RMU policy, the event seems newsworthy. I would like to have seen evidence that attempts were made to get the accused student's side of the story, but the article does include a quote describing what will happen if the student is found not guilty -- a clear reminder to the public that the courts have not yet heard the case.

Perhaps the author of this letter (Jason?) should join the staff of the Sentry and work his way up to being on the editorial board, where he can help make decisions such as where to place stories, whether to name names, and whether to publish critical letters to the editor without fully identifying the author.

If the students do their jobs as journalists, they will end up publishing stories that upset some people. Reporting that police have charged someone with a crime is not a violation of the suspect's privacy -- it's a matter of public record. Let's imagine that a student paper published a photo of a student being led across campus in handcuffs, when the police ended up realizing they had the wrong person, or for some other reason they released him without filing any charges. That would be ethically questionable.

John Hockenberry, a former NBC journalist who now works at MIT, reflects on what he says is the increasing irrelevance of TV journalism. Some of my most promising "New Media Journalism" students are interested in a broadcast journalism career, taking on internships and entering graduate school, and they all know why I prefer to get my news from the internet.  So I read this article with great interest.

The specific anecdotes about what got aired and what got spiked, such as how the decision to air a particular news item depended on whether the item had anything to do with the plot of a TV drama that led into the news show -- wow.

Networks are built on the assumption that audience size is what matters most. Content is secondary; it exists to attract passive viewers who will sit still for advertisements. For a while, that assumption served the industry well. But the TV news business has been blind to the revolution that made the viewer blink: the digital organization of communities that are anything but passive. Traditional market-driven media always attempt to treat devices, audiences, and content as bulk commodities, while users instead view all three as ways of creating and maintaining smaller-scale communities. As users acquire the means of producing and distributing content, the authority and profit potential of large traditional networks are directly challenged.

In the years since my departure from network television, I have acquired a certain detachment about how an institution so central to American culture could shift so quickly to the margins. Going from being a correspondent at Dateline--a rich source of material for The Daily Show--to working at the MIT Media Lab, where most students have no interest in or even knowledge of traditional networks, was a shock. It has given me some hard-won wisdom about the future of journalism, but it is still a mystery to me why television news remains so dissatisfying, so superficial, and so irrelevant. Disappointed veterans like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather blame the moral failure of ratings-obsessed executives, but it's not that simple. I can say with confidence that Murrow would be outraged not so much by the networks' greed (Murrow was one of the first news personalities to hire a talent agent) as by the missed opportunity to use technology to help create a nation of engaged citizens bent on preserving their freedom and their connections to the broader world.

I knew it was pretty much over for television news when I discovered in 2003 that the heads of NBC's news division and entertainment division, the president of the network, and the chairman all owned TiVos, which enabled them to zap past the commercials that paid their salaries. "It's such a great gadget. It changed my life," one of them said at a corporate affair in the Saturday Night Live studio. It was neither the first nor the last time that a television executive mistook a fundamental technological change for a new gadget.