| Summer Reading 2013: “The Reporter’s Trade” by Joseph and Stewart Alsop (1958) Posted: 05 Aug 2013 10:00 AM PDT Editor’s Note: The Nieman Foundation turns 75 years old this year, and our longevity has helped us to accumulate one of the most thorough collections of books about the last century of journalism. We at Nieman Lab are taking our annual late-summer break — expect limited posting between now and August 19 — but we thought we’d leave you readers with some interesting excerpts from our collection. These books about journalism might be decades old, but in a lot of cases, they’re dealing with the same issues journalists are today: how to sustain a news organization, how to remain relevant, and how a vigorous press can help a democracy. This is Summer Reading 2013. has the feel of a Hardy Boys adventure, if instead of investigating small-town jewel thieves, Frank and Joe Hardy traveled to global capitals, attended state dinners, and had a creeping suspicion about the Communist threat. Written in 1958 by sibling newspaper columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop, The Reporter’s Trade follows in the long tradition of journalism memoirs that mash-up biography and bibliography, with charming tales and a healthy dose of D.C. name-dropping. The Alsop brothers were reporters and columnists from around the time of World War II until the 1970s, covering politics and Washington life as well as foreign affairs and national issues. Over their careers the brothers worked together and separately, writing for places such as The New York Herald Tribune and The Saturday Evening Post. While The Reporter’s Trade devotes much of its time to recounting the duo’s reporting adventures and commentary on the postwar years, the Alsops also provide a dose of guidance on what it takes to be a journalist. “People speak of a newspaperman’s sources as though these sources were so many freely bubbling, always gushing springs. Yet the voluntary source is almost as rare as hen’s teeth,” they write. But the Alsops’ book also speaks to the culture of Washington, D.C., and the relationships between journalists and those in power. The Reporter’s Trade offers a good reminder of why it’s nice to have an expanded universe of news options — from both those within and without the corridors (or dining tables) of power. Obviously, a reporter cannot make a practice of reporting after working hours. If he does so, he will soon achieve the approximate popularity of an insurance agent who takes along a bundle of contracts to every party he goes to. Equally obviously, since men who are his friends are also men in government, the reporter must sometimes ask his friends for information or guidance. The rule is, however, that such questions are only put in a man’s office or at the luncheon table — the luncheon table being barbarously considered in Washington as a mere extension of the office. And sometimes even this rule is not strict enough to solve the problem. Our two best friends in Washington happen to be men in rather sensitive positions, who could no doubt tell us many things of extreme interest. But we long ago decided that the price of retaining these particular friends was never trying to discuss with them any matters within the area of their official responsibility, in office hours or out of office hours; we have never done so. Fortunately, our two friends have other topics besides the familiar Washington triad, gossip, politics, and real estate; so conversation rarely lags despite the impossibility of talking about our friends’ work. In the Washington correspondent’s life, hospitality is another problem that perhaps needs touching on. We come from a tribe that has an almost pathological fondness for giving parties, and we both enjoy being hospitable ourselves. In political Washington, moreover, you cannot just ask your close personal friends to your tbale. There is a strong touch of the zoo in Washington life, and everyone in Washington likes to see the lions, who also like to be seen. Washington dinner-giving is not quite so formula-ridden as it was in the old days before the war, when a prospective host or hostess would begin by asking, “who shall I have for the Ambassador, who for the Supreme Court Justice, who for the Senator?” because one-of-each was a necessary ingredient in the recipe for a successful dinner. But even today, your dinner will please everyone more if there is a lion or two to roar away at the head of the table. Even your closest friends will be a little disappointed without lions. And it is also useful to a reporter to feed the lions, if they consent to be fed.
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| Summer Reading 2013: “Newsmen Speak: Journalists on Their Craft” by Edmond D. Coblentz (1954) Posted: 05 Aug 2013 09:00 AM PDT Editor’s Note: The Nieman Foundation turns 75 years old this year, and our longevity has helped us to accumulate one of the most thorough collections of books about the last century of journalism. We at Nieman Lab are taking our annual late-summer break — expect limited posting between now and August 19 — but we thought we’d leave you readers with some interesting excerpts from our collection. These books about journalism might be decades old, but in a lot of cases, they’re dealing with the same issues journalists are today: how to sustain a news organization, how to remain relevant, and how a vigorous press can help a democracy. This is Summer Reading 2013. With a title that could be taken as an imperative or a declarative — depending on what shoes you’re standing in — Newsmen Speak is a rare compilation of wisdom from “virtually every major leader of American journalism.” Published in 1954, its gems include Arthur Hays Sulzberger on what makes a good newspaper (“Whichever way the cat may jump, we should record it…we believe that you will look after the cat if we inform you promptly, fully, and accurately about its movements”), Arthur Brisbane on journalistic success (“the longer the worse”), and William Randolph Hearst’s seven rules of newspapering. Editor Edmond D. Coblentz, who spent his journalistic career working for Hearst papers, compiled over thirty testimonies from mid-century media bigwigs about the newspaper business. Some of the entries are instructions from publishers to their staffs, and Coblentz left them largely untouched, with many uses of the imperative “you.” All of them are fascinating, but one entry in particular seems written for 2013 as much as for 1954. It’s from John S. Knight, who had not yet then merged his collection of newspapers into what would become Knight Ridder. He had recently returned to the business of running newspapers after a wartime stint as director of the U.S. Office of Censorship in London. Knight Foundation is now the most prominent philanthropic supporters of journalism (Nieman Lab is among its many grantees), and this note from its co-namesake is a reminder of why today’s newspapermen have to welcome the challenge of the digital age, and that all good change inevitably takes some grit and guts. A newspaper is still something of a mystery to the average reader and I think we should tell him more about it. The radio people have done a smooth job of selling, and we have gone at it like plumbers at a grand piano. Since I am not primarily an advertising man, I can't write your formula, but from observation gained through the years, I can say the old one won't do. My only advice on this score is that you support your editor when he tries something new. If he thinks it would be an improvement to departmentalize the paper so that readers may more easily find what they want, let him try it. His idea may be good. The old fundamental rules of journalism still hold good, but don't cling to an outmoded formula when the public is expecting a new model. Take a leaf from the manufacturers who constantly repackage their products to make them more attractive. How long would one of our automotive companies survive if it didn't constantly improve and modernize its product?
Basically, newspapers must never be lulled into the complacency that condones sloppy editing and shoddy business methods. Your first duty is to the citizen who buys your newspaper in the belief that it has character and stability, that it is at all times a defender and protector of the rights and liberties of our people, that it does not yield to the pressure of merchant or banker, politician or labor union. There is no known substitute on the market for integrity and character. And no synthetic has ever been discovered for guts.
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| Summer Reading 2013: “The Southern Country Editor” by Thomas D. Clark (1948) Posted: 05 Aug 2013 08:00 AM PDT Editor’s Note: The Nieman Foundation turns 75 years old this year, and our longevity has helped us to accumulate one of the most thorough collections of books about the last century of journalism. We at Nieman Lab are taking our annual late-summer break — expect limited posting between now and August 19 — but we thought we’d leave you readers with some interesting excerpts from our collection. These books about journalism might be decades old, but in a lot of cases, they’re dealing with the same issues journalists are today: how to sustain a news organization, how to remain relevant, and how a vigorous press can help a democracy. This is Summer Reading 2013. Thomas D. Clark’s 1948 book tells the story of how small weekly papers in the rural South adapted to a rapidly changing nation at the turn of the century, as new roads and big city dailies connected disparate, antagonistic parts of the country. Newspapers helped usher people through the chaos of Reconstruction; there were 182 country newspapers at the end of the Civil War, 499 three years later in 1868, and 1,827 by 1885. “By 1869 it was evident that the country editors were giving the common man a vital part in the rebirth of the region,” Clark writes. In the style of an anthropological study, The Southern Country Editor is an apt successor to Clark’s first book, Pills, Petticoats, and Plows, a Southern social history. Our tattered first-edition copy comes with an inscription from the author to then-curator of the Nieman Foundation Louis Lyons and some useful perspective on how local newspapers have long had a strange relationship with their more cosmopolitan peers. This excerpt from the final chapter of the book, "And Still the Presses Roll,” illustrates how new infrastructure upended the news ecosystem by bringing daily papers to the rural south, forcing the weeklies to carve out their own niche of coverage in order to stay afloat. It’s something of an analog for the state of alt-weeklies in today’s media world, and perhaps a blueprint for a kind of healthy symbiosis among competing papers. In recent years, more news syndicates have successfully invaded the rural market. Daily columnists boil their materials down to comprise a weekly summary of national affairs. Professional gossipers, popular psychologists, advisers of the lovelorn, and arbiters of etiquette all have discovered this rather profitable outlet for their wares… Earlier editors felt that world and national news coverage lay within the province of the metropolitan press, and they refrained from printing it. They conceived their task to be that of garnering materials of interest from their own localities, and they remained steadfastly in this field. On the other hand, the daily made an effort to stay out of the weekly's field by giving a broader and more impersonal coverage to its stories and editorials. On the surface, at least, most of the slanted material carried by the dailies appeared in their editorial or special columns. Daily papers became serious competitors once decent roads were built and rural free delivery routes were established. When this situation developed there had to be a more clearly defined division of fields of interest between the two types of papers for the weekly to survive. Though the city journal enlarged its patronage, the fact remained that large segments of the Southern population still had access to news only through the weekly paper. It was effective for publicizing local legal matters, giving the common man the satisfaction of seeing accounts of his social affairs in print and of supplying the county with a bulletin of events and public affairs. There was no way for a daily to compete in this field, and for this reason the two types of paper learned to exist together with fair success.
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| Summer Reading 2013: “Late City Edition” by Joseph Herzberg (1947) Posted: 05 Aug 2013 07:00 AM PDT Editor’s Note: The Nieman Foundation turns 75 years old this year, and our longevity has helped us to accumulate one of the most thorough collections of books about the last century of journalism. We at Nieman Lab are taking our annual late-summer break — expect limited posting between now and August 19 — but we thought we’d leave you readers with some interesting excerpts from our collection. These books about journalism might be decades old, but in a lot of cases, they’re dealing with the same issues journalists are today: how to sustain a news organization, how to remain relevant, and how a vigorous press can help a democracy. This is Summer Reading 2013. The 29 chapters of Late City Edition examine every facet of a 1940s newsroom in turn, from “Police Reporter” to “Girl Reporter” to “Putting the Newspaper Together.” Its final chapter is titled “What Next?” and written by Fitzhugh Turner, the Middle East correspondent-turned-diplomatic correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. He speaks to the anxieties of newspaper publishers when faced with competition from new distribution methods — here, television and radio. By the time Turner was writing this, some shifts had already become apparent: world-shattering events were trumpeted by radio announcers, not by the headlines on extras, and newspapers were forced to think more and more about context and interpretation when a story would be a day old by the time it reached the printed page the next day. How to translate those shifts into revenue was less clear — a reminder that the news industry has been fretting over competition for advertising dollars for a long time, and that resistance to change didn’t begin with the advent of the Internet. There are also some lessons in here for publishers fond of slash-and-burn tactics to reach profitability: “Suffice it to say here that the publisher or broadcaster willing to corner the market and peddle a second-rate product is assuring himself only of eventual demise,” he wrote. There are those in this dawn of the Buck Rogers era who maintain that the newspaper is on the way to join such institutions as the bustle and the five-cent beer — that the printed page is doomed by the approach of television, facsimile broadcasting, and heaven only knows what else. Maybe so, but the day that Mr. John Citizen runs an antenna out of his collar, swallows a pill, and subconsciously absorbs the news is probably some time off. Nobody now in the newspaper business expects the profession to blow up in his face during his lifetime. The prospect, rather, is that technological developments, while they will change newspapers, will stimulate, not supplant them. Evidence to support this outlook can be found in the industry’s recent rather embarrassing experience with radio. As a preface to a discussion of the future, it might be well to give this experience brief examination. Back in the 1920s, viewers-with-alarm, heeding the first broadcasts of news events, looked into the future, and cried gloomily that this new thing, radio, some day was going to put them out of work. With the news available first hand and early, they argued, who was going to bother to read it second hand and late? Anxiety at first was confined largely to editorial departments, but with the depression years it moved into business offices. Hard-pressed publishers, accustomed to viewing the news as something much like personal property, began to give way to jealousy of the growing slice radio was cutting from the advertising dollar. As a result, many newspapers banned radio publicity, and some even refused to publish bare program listings, probably on the theory that if they pretended radio wasn’t there, it might go away.
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