Kamis, 08 Agustus 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Summer Reading 2013: “Goodbye Gutenberg: The Newspaper Revolution of the 1980s” by Anthony Smith (1980)

Posted: 07 Aug 2013 11:00 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.

Goodbye Gutenberg: The Newspaper Revolution of the 1980s by Anthony Smith

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“We now all know that by the year 2000 or 2010, systems of information will be far more interactive and abundant,” Anthony Smith writes, “based more upon electronic transfer than physical carriage, upon individual selection than generalized transmission.”

Smith’s Goodbye Gutenberg: The Newspaper Revolution of the 1980s is a look at a healthy industry enjoying the quiet before the storm. That’s not the reader having the benefit of hindsight, but Smith laying out the case that technology, already transforming the production and delivery of printed papers, will cause major changes to journalism.

Smith’s view of the future of media is shaped through his background in television. He proposes an information world of tomorrow that revolves around a screen: the TV. Smith was a producer for the BBC during the 1960s, later moving on to become director of the British Film Institute. He also served as president of Magdalen College, Oxford.

Information delivered directly to the home is coming, he says. And while that may not amount to much during the Reagan administration, “this means that the decade of the nineties is going to be one in which the traditional newspaper may face decline, extinction, or at least complete internal self-reappraisal.”

In Goodbye Gutenberg, Smith spends much of his time taking stock of how computers have changed the inner workings of newspapers, from subscriber billing and delivery routes to reporting and editing in the newsroom. But he also stops to consider what relationship electronic media will have with traditional media, how these two sides will compete, and what it will mean to be a new breed of publisher. He was decades ahead of the debates on aggregation, copyright, and the role of non-institutional publishing.

We have been examining in some detail the role of the computer inside the existing newspaper industry and have seen something of the impact it exercises over employment, industrial structure, and profits. The transference of information storage to computer is, however, also creating a new range of external media, so to speak, new devices to bring reading materials into the home or office. As a result, a vast range of perplexing issues is opening up. Should we consider these new media merely as extensions of the newspaper form? Are they simply new publishers (and old) moving into a new form of competition with the newspaper? Are they a threat to the newspaper or to any other information medium? Are they news media at all, or rather some new kind of reference medium? Will they remain forever locked into specialist forms of information, thereby stripping the newspaper of some range of material but leaving the bulk of information paper-bound as in the last several centuries?

There are other questions to be faced as well. Who is responsible for these new media that all depend upon telecommunications carriers that are either designated as common carriers or as nationalized monopolies? Is it possible, therefore, to transfer to devices that send information direct to the home on video screens the whole panopoly of ethical and regulatory paraphernalia — the rights of reporters, editors and publishers; doctrines of objectivity; editorial freedom; news values?

Are all these terms now to become part of some antiquated information theology, displaced by a new set of ethics emerging from a rearranged set of tensions between governments, providers of information, carriers, and readers? What will happen to libel laws, codes of journalistic conduct, contempt rules, and copyright protection in a medium that through its sheer profusion of material is unpoliceable, as ungovernable technically as the telephone conversations of an entire society?

Summer Reading 2013: “Of the Press, By the Press, For the Press, and Others, Too” by Laura Longley Babb (1974)

Posted: 07 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.

Of the Press, By the Press, For the Press, and Others, Too: A Critical Study of the Inside Workings of the News Business, ed. Laura Longley Babb

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Amazon

Newspapers entered the 1970s facing “a crisis of public confidence in the news media” as people lost their trust in public service generally in the aftermath of Vietnam. Facing the intractable situation of reporting without credibility in the eyes of its audience, The Washington Post started publishing short “F.Y.I.” editorials with the goal of increasing transparency about the paper’s inner workings and the media more broadly. The editorials were precursors to the ombudsman role that the Post would introduce a year later, and those, together with the F.Y.I pieces, news business columns, and internal memos, make up this book, published in 1974.

The introduction, by Washington Post editorial page editor Philip L. Geyelin, explains all of this, and also explains why it’s so important to report on the news. The media climate he warns of is eerily similar to that which we face today: the Obama administration is aggressively pursuing government employees who leak information to the press, and the professional access privileges of reporters are open to public debate.

The best defense of the press is self-reporting, Geyelin claims, backing his case with some choice quotations from Walter Lippmann. Geyelin’s introduction underscores the point that the current questions facing the press may be physically but not philosophically different from those of the past.

So what does this history tell us? That it is too hard? That the news business is better off covering everything but the news business?

The answer, it seems to me, is that it is obviously hard — perhaps too hard to sustain a regular thing — but that the concept of self-criticism is no less sound on this account and that the practice of it is no less needed in direct proportion to the amount of disfavor and distrust the press, for whatever valid or invalid reasons, may be encountering at a given time. For when the press is out of favor, people get to talking about doing something about it; at about that time, it seems to me, the press is well advised to start thinking in very serious ways of doing something of its own in the way of policing and examining and criticizing itself.

In Liberty and the News, published in 1920, Lippmann predicted that “in some form or other the next generation will attempt to bring the publishing business under greater social control. There is everywhere an increasingly angry disillusionment about the press, a growing sense of being baffled and mislead; and wise publishers will not poo-poo these omens.”

Lippmann accompanied this rather extraordinarily prescient warning with some sound advice. Publishers, he said, “might well note the history of prohibition where a failure to work out a program of temperance brought about an undiscriminating taboo…If publishers…themselves do not face the facts and attempt to deal with them, some day Congress, in a fit of temper, egged on by an outraged public opinion, will operate on the press with an ax.”

If that counsel was appropriate to the 1920s, the evidence of our senses commends it more than ever in the 1970s.

Citizen Bezos: Amazon’s founder is looking for a legacy

Posted: 07 Aug 2013 09:50 AM PDT

jeffbezos2

“I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.” — Charles Foster Kane, Citizen Kane

After hearing of Jeff Bezos’ $250 million cash purchase of The Washington Post and associated regional papers, Slate’s Farhad Manjoo observed that “even if the Post lost $100 million a year… Bezos’ personal fortune could fund it for 252 years.” This arithmetic immediately reminded me of the classic scene in Citizen Kane where Kane angrily defends his management of the New York Chronicle to his guardian and banker Walter Thatcher:

You’re right, Mr. Thatcher, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in… [smiles] 60 years.

Let’s be clear: apart from his energy and broad ambition, Bezos is not Charles Foster Kane. Titans from technology companies today may have wealth and influence nearly comparable to that of railroad, oil, and silver barons of old, but if Bezos wanted to run a second company on the side for “fun,” he already has one that builds rocketships that fly into space. And in the film, Kane did burn through his wealth and sell his newspaper empire (at the precise time Eugene Meyer purchased the struggling Washington Post). Citizen Kane is Jeff Bezos’ cautionary tale.

Bezos is not Facebook’s Chris Hughes looking for a second act, or Boston’s John Henry closing the circle on a local empire. And while it’s fun to write what-if fan fiction about diabolical schemes Bezos might concoct to turn the Post into an organ for Amazon’s interests or use his combined power to become a new tyrant-king, I don’t think that’s what he’s up to either.

As a technology journalist who’s been preoccupied with Amazon for my adult life, I’ve spent more time than is probably healthy trying to figure out the mind of Jeffrey Preston Bezos. It’s not easy. He’s gregarious but guarded, known mostly through his letters to Amazon shareholders and rare disclosures from friends. In his own words, he’s “willing to be misunderstood for a long time.” While he can be brilliant and ruthless in business, with an uncanny ability to roll new revenues into new investments, there’s a strong and growing part of him that’s equally preoccupied with what happens when the whirlwind stops, and what he will leave behind. Bezos is looking for a legacy beyond Amazon that will survive and sustain him.

So far, Bezos’ legacy efforts have been overwhelmingy remote. There’s his famous investment in a ten thousand year clock buried inside a mountain in West Texas. (“As I see it, humans are now technologically advanced enough that we can create not only extraordinary wonders but also civilization-scale problems,” Bezos writes. “We’re likely to need more long-term thinking.”)

There’s his company Blue Origin, which blends this extended horizon with Bezos’ long-held interest in human spaceflight. And there’s the new Bezos Center for Innovation at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, endowed by Bezos and his wife, novelist MacKenzie Bezos. The center is devoted to inspiring young people with stories about Seattle’s history of invention, from Boeing and Microsoft to Amazon.

All of these efforts stress invention, experimentation, and patience. They also offer serious and immediate technical challenges to be solved, which seems to be what piques Bezos’ interest and how he most enjoys spending his time. In that respect, they’re very similar to his role as CEO of Amazon. But they also represent a pact between the present and the future, something you don’t immediately associate with online retail.

Really, this is another way in which Amazon is misunderstood. The company has become much more than a retailer. It’s an infrastructure and technology conglomerate, tasked with building and reinventing systems, from physical warehouses to virtual currencies, that can outlast the destruction of entire industries, starting with the printed books that made the company a household name. But the Bezos Center, Blue Origin, the Ten Thousand Year Clock, and The Washington Post manifest that legacy in a different way. Part of their appeal is that to some extent, they’re walled off from the continual tumult of Amazon.

“I am happily living in ‘the other Washington’ where I have a day job that I love,” Bezos writes in a note to Post employees. “I imagine he'll be pretty hands off," adds Amazon board member Tom Alberg.

In fact, Amazon’s shareholders are counting on it. They don’t value the company at $136 billion because of its profits; those don’t exist. Amazon is valuable because of its dominant position in e-retail and because of the belief that Bezos has a vision to guide its continued growth. There are many reasons Bezos bought the Post on his own and not as part of Amazon, but one is that entangling the two company’s fates too closely could damage Amazon’s capitalization (the overwhelming source of Bezos’ wealth) tremendously.

By all accounts, Bezos did not go looking to buy a newspaper. When he was approached by his friend Donald Graham about buying the Post, he initially begged off considering it. Months later, Bezos changed his mind, clinching the deal over two face-to-face meetings at Allen & Co.'s annual media conference at Sun Valley, Idaho in July. What changed?

Donald Graham did not want to sell The Washnington Post. He’d inherited its stewardship from his mother Katharine Graham, who’d inherited it from her father Eugene Meyer. The Grahams were compelled to sell the Post because of the profit demands of its much larger, publicly-traded namesake company. “Katharine [Weymouth] and I not only hadn't wanted to do it; we literally hadn't thought about it,” Graham told Staci Kramer for Nieman Lab. “Seven years of declining revenues will give you new ideas.”

Remember, Bezos’ mind is always focused on both the dangers and possibilities lurking in the future. Looking at Donald Graham and his family, he has to be able to imagine a world — perhaps beyond his own lifetime — where Amazon’s shareholders no longer give him or his successors the benefit of the doubt and become like those at the Washington Post Co. He has to imagine that like the Grahams, Bezos’ own vision and legacy could be dismantled or compromised beyond his or his family’s control.

Looking at Donald Graham, Bezos must have imagined by purchasing the newspaper, that he could at least ameliorate that fate for the Grahams. He must also have imagined that he could gather the best minds at his disposal, from hotshot web designers and technical officers to accountants and efficiency troubleshooters, to try to find a way not just to save The Post, but to build and reinvent a premier national news organization that could survive even the destruction of its own industry.

Jeff Bezos has four children, who are now becoming teenagers. One is adopted, as he was by his stepfather, Miguel Bezos — a Cuban immigrant who came to the US as a teenager, became an engineer, and sent his son Jeff to Princeton. Interviews with Bezos’ friends say that his and MacKenzie’s family is unusually close-knit, stable, and traditional: Honda minivans and kitchen-table science experiments. They’re the opposite of Kane and his wife, sitting across a long table from one another in silence, reading rival newspapers.

“In selling to Mr. Bezos,” writes the New York Times’ David Carr, “the Grahams left the Sulzbergers, the owners of The New York Times, as the last family standing in a club that once also included the Chandlers (Los Angeles Times), the Copleys (San Diego Tribune), the Cowles (Minneapolis Star Tribune), and the Bancrofts (Wall Street Journal).” But while it’s true that public and corporate ownership of news organizations has thinned the ranks of newspaper dynasties (and not always for the better), it’s not strictly speaking true that the Sulzbergers now stand alone. Besides the Blethen family, which has owned and operated Bezos’ local paper The Seattle Times since 1896, the club can now boast some new members.

It’s become fashionable among the West Coast billionaire set to ask their children to pull themselves up by their bootstraps (if bootstraps were lined with millions of dollars), but there’s no reason to think Bezos shares this view. Instead of a public company led by the Graham family, or the enormous and equally public Amazon, the Post will become part of a much smaller company, owned in full by the Bezos family. The Bezoses become part of the same chain as the Grahams, connecting the past with the future. Jeff Bezos has something he can leave to his children, and to the world, beyond the company he runs. And one of Bezos’ sons or daughters, if he or she wishes, may become the next Walter Annenberg or Katherine Graham.

This is far from the only reason Bezos is willing to take on ownership of one of our most storied newspapers now, but it’s a big one. After all, in Citizen Kane, the identity of Rosebud isn’t the master key to understanding the man, but a single piece in a jigsaw puzzle.

Image by Doc Searls used under a Creative Commons license.

Summer Reading 2013: “Media Power: Who is Shaping Your Picture of the World” by Robert Stein (1972)

Posted: 07 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.

Media Power: Who is Shaping Your Picture of the World by Robert Stein

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Amazon

In 1972, Robert Stein foresaw a coming glut of information for the average reader. “As we learn more and more of what is happening in the world,” Stein wrote, “we seem less and less capable of understanding what it means.”

Stein’s book, Media Power: Who is Shaping Your Picture of the World, is an attempt to assess the present and future of journalism at a time when the industry was being buffeted by a generational change in the workforce, an increasingly adversarial government, and advancing technology. A journalism professor, writer, and editor for newspapers and magazines, Stein also served as chairman of the American Society of Magazine Editors. Media Power was his first book.

For technology in particular, Stein saw the media at an inflection point, where journalists could take stock of how computers, video cassettes, and other communications tools could affect how information is delivered. Newspapers and other media find themselves in a difficult position, Stein writes, because these new tools offer a lot of promise to journalist, but also a new host of problems. Here, in an example that sounds like a mix of market research and A/B testing, Stein discusses the role computers played in helping one newspaper assess its headline writing. But he also speaks to the conflict journalists, editors and managers in particular, feel in making decisions about the use of technology in the newsroom.

In 1971 the Cincinnati Enquirer spent $25,000 on a computer study to find out what mixture of headlines would attract the maximum number of readers. Among the findings was that the combination of a Kennedy scandal and a no-hit game by a local pitcher would help circulation. Overall, however, the computer decided that the Enquirer was close to an “ideal” newspaper. Upon learning the results, the paper’s editor commented: You don’t know whether to feel good you spent the money to find out you’re doing well or whether it was a waste.

In a larger sense, editors and publishers have displayed a similar attitude — a combination of awe, unease and astonishing gullibility — toward the application of technology to their profession. By temperament, they are hostile to the idea that machines will ever replace their own judgment or even seriously alter the conditions under which it functions. At the same time, they are haunted by the occupational fear that they may be missing out on something new. As a result, they are more likely to buy the Brooklyn Bridge from a technological pitchman than invest in real estate on the outskirts of a growing city. Like the original country rube, they are victimized by a combination of innocence and misplaced guile.

Their vulnerability also arises from their conflicting tendencies as journalists and business executives. As journalists, they are firmly rooted in the belief that perception is an exclusively human enterprise — reporters observe and listen, editors organize and evaluate. As businessmen, they know that mass marketing is susceptible to some of the same techniques that helped NASA land a man on the moon.

Summer Reading 2013: “The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media” by Ben H. Bagdikian (1971)

Posted: 07 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.

The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media by Ben H. Bagdikian

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Amazon

Forecasting the future has always been a difficult business. This did not stop Ben Bagdikian from laying out a vision for the future of information and technology in 1971 with his book The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media. Bagdikian’s book is less of a hard and fast blueprint of how computers and other machines will change the media than an examination of the possibilities new technology can provide. The Information Machines was born out of a study Bagdikian worked on for the RAND Corporation.

There’s a measured, thoughtful optimism in Bagdikian’s assessment, even as it covers the challenges broadcast and print will face in the future. “Somehow computers will be involved in the storage, delivery, and switching of popular communications,” he writes; “somehow there will be additional capacity for the consumer in his home to receive a greater variety of information than he does now. He may be able to control the timing, content, and form of this information flow in ways not now available to him.”

Some may know Bagdikian for his role helping to publish parts of the Pentagon Papers while an editor at The Washington Post. He’s also the author of The Media Monopoly, one of the first books to look at the subject of media consolidation and what corporate ownership means to journalism. He also served as dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the UC Berkeley.

In trying to imagine a possible future, Bagdikian also tries to take stock of the past. In particular, Bagdikian considers the economics of news, and how media companies will finance innovation of new technologies to help deliver the news.

The most innocent view of the economics of news is that the consumer pays his daily dime for his paper and gets broadcast news free.

That is not true, of course. One way or another, the consumer pays more for the system that bring him his daily news than he does for his telephone service. This is not a small consideration in the future of news. The way Americans will get their public information in the next generation will depend less on the technological question about machines, “Will they work?” but more on “Who pays?”

If it were not for the question of who decides on money spent for news, if the future were determined solely by the ability of new devices to work, the country could start at once installing a far more sophisticated and satisfying system of distributing public information. But that isn’t enough. Some of the new machines at present cost too much for ordinary use. Others could be afforded by most families, but they are useful only when part of a large and elaborate network that no one has yet organized.

Innovations will have to appear profitable to those who sell, operate, and buy them. Inventions must convince the public that they will perform old functions more efficiently or will offer new services that are extremely attractive. Electric refrigerator were adopted because in annual cost and performance they were superior substitutes for iceboxes. On the other hand, telephones, radio, and television provided functions the consumer had never experienced before but they looked appealing enough for the average family to make room for them in their budget, their home, and their daily schedule.

Deciding who pays for news is not simple. If news proprietors went to the wholesale market at dawn to buy large quantities of information and retailed it to consumers later in the day, the transaction would be relatively simple. But almost all news is distributed along with unrelated products — merchandising, information, entertainment, etc. — that have their own costs and benefits. Today the average consumer cannot select and pay solely for his daily news. In general, no systematic daily news is distributed unless it is associated with other activities whose primary objective is to collect large audiences for the purpose of selling merchandise.

Summer Reading 2013: “Due To Circumstances Beyond Our Control” by Fred Friendly (1967)

Posted: 07 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.

Due To Circumstances Beyond Our Control by Fred Friendly

Google Books
Amazon

When big news develops today, we have an expectation it’ll be splashed across our TV and the other screens that occupy our time. It could be the bombing at the Boston Marathon or a dangerous police chase on the interstate: We know that our TV will be interrupted.

Fred Friendly would be relieved by this. Friendly was the news producer who worked with Edward R. Murrow on shows like See It Now and before becoming president of CBS News. That all ended in 1966 when Friendly resigned after executives at the network chose to air an episode of The Lucy Show rather than show live coverage of a Senate hearing on U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Due To Circumstances Beyond Our Control was published in the wake of Friendly’s split with the network, and the book carries no small amount of indignation about the state of TV news. On the surface, Friendly’s book is an account of his 16 years at the network, reflecting on the stories he pursued with Murrow and the evolving status of the news operation inside CBS. In some ways, Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control reads like an early tell-all, outlining the faults of a network more concerned with commercial hits and ratings than reporting the news.

But the book is also a warning about the future of TV in a world where competition among networks and changing viewer habits threaten to reduce the importance of news. “If you condition an audience to expect The McCoys or Leave It To Beaver,” he writes, “of course it will reject the Vietnam hearings or a McNamara news conference when it is broadcast in their place.”

One problem, Friendly says, is data. Specifically, ratings — how success is measured on TV, and how that success influences what advertisers pay for. His words may resonate today with other news producers or editors who are searching for the right metrics for news and other programming — in particular, his assessment of the value of Nielsen and its ratings is interesting as the company tries to expand its system to include viewers on new platforms.

I never knew anyone at CBS who thought much of the Nielsen sample. There were constant attempts to have it improved, but the standard answer to any protest about it was: “Don’t knock it; advertisers take it as their bible and the advertising rates are established by it.” And when it came to predicting what program those twelve hundred sets would be tuned to, the CBS buyers were wizards. Whatever the knack is, the other networks have now developed similar extrasensory perception, and the difference in the ratings between the three networks at certain hours or even for the week’s average is sometimes less than a point.

A.C. Nielsen, Sr., with whom I once discussed the power of his sample, defends the survey as reasonably accurate, though not to be construed as a finite measurement of the viewing habits of millions. What the networks do with his figures is their business, he says, but it was not his idea that they should be the basis for choosing all of the broadcast schedule. Independent specialists in the field of sampling are convinced that a television and radio industry whose revenues total $2,750,000,000 a year and spends so little on audience research as to afford only a survey of the Nielsen proportions, is in the position of gauging space-age tolerances with the kind of dip stick used to measure the amount of gas in a Model T.

Regardless of the accuracy or distortion of Nielsen’s projections, they are fed into that vending-machine bureaucracy and are the final arbiter. There are exceptions, but in general the staple diet of television is cued to the taste of those twelve hundred homes. The fact that the popularity of programs is based on a sliding scale makes this barometer no less pernicious. Programs like F Troop and Gilligan’s Island are on the air because they are in the middle range of ratings, but if some exciting new gimmick appeared and dropped them in the comparative standings they would be in trouble, even if their Nielsen ratings remained constant. As soon as the system realizes that there is a larger potential audience to be found in another format, a weaker program will disappear, for what television now demands is the largest possible audience. Testifying before the FCC, Frank Stanton as much as defined it in these terms: “…to appear to most of the people most of the time…”
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