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?
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.

Social responsibility: The Hutchins, MacBride, and Miller 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 individually 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.
5. MacBride Commission, 1980: Many Voices, One World
6. Miller Commission, March 2010: Old Media, New Media and the Challenge to Democratic Governance

 STRUCTURE, collapse and new media 

 The end of the print media

1. Online media is replacing newspapers and TV. Is that a bad thing?  Christian Science Monitor.
2. New media meltdown at New Century — Business Week, 1998
3. Bloggers versus journalists – twisted psychology, false dichotomy. By Jay Rosen.
4. Will newspaper values ever recover?  — Newsosaur blog.
5. Rehire The Journalists! Audiences Want More Science
6. Barbie can be a multimedia journalist
7. Journalism.org- The State of the News Media 2010
8. State of the News Media 2010 – Pew Research Center
9. How the newspaper industry tried to invent the Web but failed. -  Jack Shafer – Slate Magazine, 2009.
10. Stverak, Jason. “The pros and pros of ‘Citizen Journalism,’ ” Online Journalism Review, March 12, 2010.
11. Gene Weingarten: How ‘branding’ is ruining journalism
12. Chris Hedges: The Death of Journalism, June 27, 2011.
13. Why Are We Still Consuming News Like It’s 1899? By Ben Huh, May 2011, founder of I Can Has Cheeseburger.
14. Jack Lessenberry, How to kill the news, Sept. 7, 2011. “Reporters should crowdsource, tweet, shoot, SMS, live chat and — oh, yeah — report the news.”
15. How the Daytona News Journal’s value dropped from $300 million to $20 million between 2006 and 2010.  Alan D. Mutter’s  Newsosaur blog.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. Before Watergate could be Googled. Wall Street Journal, April 16, 2012.
19. 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.
20. 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.

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 the news  

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.