| Summer Reading 2013: “The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age” by Lawrence K. Grossman (1995) Posted: 08 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. sets out to take a broad look at the changing relationship between media and politics. It was written by Lawrence K. Grossman after he stepped down from his position as president of NBC in 1988. After a stint at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, where Grossman says he started to think about the way technology was changing the nature of American democracy, he became a professor at Columbia. Grossman splits his exploration of “democracy in the information age” into two halves. The first looks at the death of the old democracy, while the second explores what Grossman calls the dawn of the “electronic republic.” This is a vision for a direct democracy in which advancing communication technologies — including “television, faxes, on-line communications and other instant media” — allow citizens to play a much more active role in their government than simply voting. Grossman’s allusions to voter participation in legislation calls to mind the White House’s much discussed online petition forum, We the People. The book is also prescriptive in its final chapters. Grossman offers suggestions for media reform that give primacy to the First Amendment, making him an early participant in the never-ending debate over what makes a journalist, who is and isn’t worthy of protection. After surveying the historical relationship between the press and the government, Grossman argues that new media will be more easily threatened by censorship, and encourages the reader to therefore fight all the harder to protect it. Trying to make sense of how the First Amendment should work in the future, especially during a time of radical change in communications technology, is daunting, but so is trying to understand the at-times mysterious and often contradictory ways of First Amendment doctrine during the past two hundred years. Telecommunications technology alone has expanded to the point where, as we have seen, video today can be delivered in a variety of ways: videocassette recordings, and discs, over the air television through broadcast stations, cable television, telephone line transmission, direct broadcast satellite, wireless cable, and computers (CD-ROM). The future world of high resolution, interactive and digital transmissions will soon be here, permitting viewers “to order, access, store, and manipulate video, when and where they want it.” My own conviction is that the more complicated and diverse communications technology becomes, the simpler and more unambiguous our First Amendment protection should be. The electronic republic will best be served in the twenty-first century by returning to the late eighteenth century approach to the press that was specified in the Bill of Rights. Its content should be entirely free from “abridgment” by government. In that respect, tomorrow’s telecommunications media should joy the same freedom of as yesterday’s print press. That freedom should hold no matter what form its content may take: whether print, sound, film, or tape; whether the message appears on television, computer, or movie screen or is delivered via satellite, transmitter, microwave, cable, phone, fax, printing press or soapbox. Although written long before the advent of what we now know as mass media and certainly long before the arrival of personal telecommunications media, the First Amendment’s centuries-old language, taken literally, should be the beacon for the future. The following principles should sharp the nation’s approach to free speech and a free press during the transformation to the electronic republic, no matter how the telecommunications environment may evolve. - The First Amendment should apply to all media equally. The consent of all media should be equally free from government intrusion
- No prior restraint should be placed on any medium, no matter what its format
- No restrictions should be imposed on who may publish or transmit information
- The maximum possible diversity of media ownership and control should be sought
- There must be universal access to the emerging transmission networks; a public sphere should be reserved for all citizens for civic information, discussion, debate and decision making
- There must be a free, independent, and properly financed system of public telecommunications; that system, I believe, should be supported at least in part by fees from commercial telecommunications service providers and spectrum auctions
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| Summer Reading 2013: “News for All: America’s Coming of Age with the Press” by Thomas Leonard (1995) Posted: 08 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. In News for All, Thomas Leonard takes a look at America’s “love-hate relationship” with the news, going back to the habits of colonists in 18th century taverns. By the time he gets to the 1980s and ’90s, he focuses on the debates surrounding the personalization of news from services like AOL and CompuServe and then newspaper “audiotex.” “Americans were safe from a narcissistic daily paper arriving on the front porch in the twentieth century. But the electronic off-shoots of the newspaper were a different reminder,” Leonard wrote — a reminder that simply being able to access articles without a printed page was considered by some to be the death knell of the editor. Leonard’s example of choice for this push toward serving niche audiences is Pig Life magazine, which was supposed to make money for its media conglomerate owner by using subscriber lists to hold conferences and exhibitions. That’s an idea we’ve heard once or twice since then. Media companies have wagered huge sums that text would someday be delivered on portable, interactive screens that would complete the dream of customization (with appropriate bills). At the Media Lab of MIT the name for this future edition is “The Daily Me.” This new age, if it was dawning, was really a return to the forgotten day when scrapbook makers checked their cosmic bank balance and entrepreneurs ordered their clippings on rats, lighting rods, and jails. What was different was the spectacle of the whole public, not just a few, editing what was published. Also, the editor’s desk did not look the same when the reader sat at it. Many editors were not pleased by the specter of readers ordering up the news. Katherine Fanning, who has edited dailies in Alaska and Massachusetts, believes that “there is a point at which there is information people should have, even if they don’t know they want it and even if they don’t tell you they want it.” Ray Cave, managing editor of Time, said in 1987: “I hate reader surveys, and may be the only editor alive who has never attended a focus group.” This is indeed an eccentric view at the end of the twentieth century. Shouts that the reader is always right come form the center of business thinking in journalism. “Know Thy Reader,” managers plead: “There’s no reason not to give readers what they want — even if it means diverging from tradition.” Up-to-date editors of metropolitan papers, even in monopoly markets, told the profession that “the surest way to editorial failure is to impose upon readers our own sense of what they ought to know.” That rising force in the American press, Rupert Murdoch, has tackled electronic publishing with the determination “to put the ‘me’ back in media”… If the past is a guide, some editors will have the last laugh over such marketing wisdom. The value of a point of view and a genius to organize information has never before been diminished by changes in technology or merchandising. These were skills that grew in the nineteenth century, uniting Americans with news in print. The explosive growth in information through new media can only increase the value of perceptive judgments for more people. What is likely to fade is the value of a pedestrian ordering of facts and ideas. Readers can now assemble these things for themselves with less help from professionals. With everyone his own editor, her own editor, journalists have to prove, all over again, that they know their job.
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| Summer Reading 2013: “1-800-PRESIDENT” (1993) Posted: 08 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. In 1992, Bill Clinton ran for president against George Bush (and Ross Perot) and won. In 1993, the Twentieth Century Fund (today, reasonably, just The Century Foundation) commissioned a report on the role that the press — specifically, television news — played in that campaign. As Richard Leone, president of the foundation, put it in his forward: “Television coverage was intense, but no one seemed happy with it.” Over a dozen journalists and researchers contributed to the report, which was published, along with three “background papers,” under the remarkable title 1-800-PRESIDENT. (1992 was the year that candidate Jerry Brown’s key innovation was repeating a 1-800 number at every event and appearance to drive donations.) Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the Penn professor and author of over a dozen books on media and the presidency, wrote an essay on the “subversive effects of a focus on strategy in news coverage of presidential campaigns,” and Thomas Patterson, our friend and a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, provided a paper called “Let the Press Be the Press: Principles of Campaign Reform.” A third paper was written by New Yorker writer Ken Auletta. In “On and Off the Bus: Lessons from the Campaign of ’92,” Auletta gets into detail about what it’s like to cover the day-to-day of a political campaign in a news environment dominated by talk shows and TV personalities. He expresses the mindset of a campaign reporter struggling to distinguish gossip from news after months of hearing the same stump speeches over and over again, and how candidates ultimately sought more direct communication with voters when the press focused on issues other than the ones the candidates wanted to talk about. (Any of that sound familiar?) With Barack Obama conducting Google Hangouts and emails from the First Lady landing in our inboxes, the question of what role the press plays in politics is still a relevant one. The mainstream media’s share of access to the citizenry has shrunk. Next time you hear someone complain about Obama’s tense relationship with the Washington press corps, remember Clinton handing out VHS tapes on the trail: Kerrey and Tom Harkin and Paul Tsongas and Jerry Brown fretted about Clinton, but on the eve of the nation’s first primary, the governor of Arkansas knew his main foe was the media, the hive of reporters interposing itself between him and the voters. He knew he had to escape the incessant questions about Gennifer Flowers and her impact on the polls, escape questions about how he had eluded the military draft three decades ago. He had to get back to talk about about the economy, to showing that he was not a slick, draft-dodging male bimbo. So Clinton struggled to bypass the media middleman. Twice he purchased a half-hour on local TV to take direct questions from viewers. HIs staff distributed twenty-thousand video tapes to voters. He appeared at rallies all over the state. Clinton was determined to meet some voters. He did not always succeed. He was trapped in a new version of a familiar pastime: the Political Insider Game. Novelist and essayist Joan Didion, who dropped in on the 1988 presidential campaign as if she were visiting another planet, wrote this in the November 1988 New York Review of Books. When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about "the democratic process," or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life… What strikes one most vividly about such a campaign is precisely its remoteness from the life of the rest of the country.
…Which brings us to Act Two of the 1992 campaign: post-Perot. The date citizens first froze the attention of the press and the candidates was February 20, 1992, the night H. Ross Perot appeared on CNN’s “Larry King Live” viewer call-in show. Asked if her were “any scenario in which you would run for president” Perot responded that he might — if citizens in each of the fifty states organized and “on your own” got his name on the ballot. Perot was treating citizens as participants, not spectators, much as FDR did with his fireside radio chats in the 1930s. Perot told King he wished “that everybody in this country would start acting like an owner,” and recognizing the power of technology to eliminate the press or party middleman. By using satellites, he could stay home and take to voters all over America, bypassing the networks and the “boys on the bus.” He could take some of the frantic quality out of a campaign, the hopscotching from airport to airport, the mindless photo ops. One day, Perot knew, citizens would be able to vote at home. One day soon they could have what he called an “electronic town hall.” If he were elected president, Perot said, the first thing he would do would be to create a direct democracy through electronic town halls.”
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| Summer Reading 2013: “The New Precision Journalism” by Philip Meyer (1991) Posted: 08 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 idea of “precision journalism” first surfaced in 1969, when former Nieman Fellow Philip Meyer wrote his classic book on the art of melding social science practice with traditional journalism. Over the next twenty years, as technologies developed, Meyer taught journalism students how to build stories from public records. By 1991, the tools for analysis had advanced to the point that Meyer saw fit to write a new book — The New Precision Journalism. In an attempt to be both comprehensive and pragmatic, Meyer covers the “history of journalism in the scientific tradition; elements and techniques of data analysis; the use of statistics, computers, surveys and field experiments; database applications; election surveys; and the politics of precision journalism.” Some of these techniques and technologies, new then, sounds obvious today; for example, Knight Ridder’s VU/TEXT service, which allowed you to use multiple search terms to comb for useful articles in a database. But what’s most prescient about Meyer’s manual is not the technological advances, or his admonition to journalism students to pick up these tools as quickly as possible. After two decades of thinking about social science journalism, Meyer offers advice on how to incorporate these skills into traditional reporting in a way that’s highly relevant to how we talk today about incorporating data journalism into the newsroom, and helping everyone from developers to designers think and build as storytellers. Here’s an example: Bill Dedman of the Atlanta Constitution won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting with an overlay of census figures on race and federally mandated bank reports on home loans. The guts of his series was in a single quantitative comparison: the rate of loans was five times as high for middle-income white neighborhoods as it was for carefully matched middle-income black neighborhoods. One number does not a story make, and Dedman backed up the finding with plenty of old-fashioned leg work. His stories provided a good mix of general data and specific examples, such as the fluent black educator who had to try three banks and endure insulting remarks about his neighborhood before getting his home improvement loan. One of the most telling illustrations was a pair of maps of the Atlanta metropolitan area. One showed the areas that were 50 percent black or more in the 1980 census. The other showed the areas where fewer than 10 percent of owner occupied homes were financed with loans from banks or savings and loan associations. The two patterns were a near perfect match. Dedman had help. In evaluating the evidence of racial prejudice on the part of banks, he followed a methodological trail that had been established by university researchers. Dwight Morris, the assistant managing editor for special projects, supervised the computer analysis. No complicated mainframe or sophisticated statistical analysis package was needed. The job was done with Framework, an Ashton-Tate product that integrates basic word processing, database management, spreadsheet, communication, and graphics software. There are a lot of good, complicated stories behind simple numbers. The trick is to identify the number that will tell the story and then go find it. The new tools for manipulating data in public records should make it easier for journalists to find and reveal such light-giving numbers.
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| Summer Reading 2013: “The Rise of the Computer State” by David Burnham (1983) Posted: 08 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. David Burnham’s The Rise of the Computer State came out in 1983, a time when, for the most obvious of reasons, making comparisons between George Orwell’s 1984 and real life was coming into vogue. Burnham was an investigative reporter at The New York Times for nearly twenty years, and The Rise of the Computer State was his third book — his first two were about corruption, money, and the government. The book speaks to the history of government data and the combination of fear and anger many Americans feel when confronted with how much our government knows about us. Based on his foreword to the book, excerpted below, one can only imagine how Walter Cronkite would have responded to recent discoveries about how much digital information about us the NSA has. In a New York Times review of the book, John Brooks writes: “The Government’s huge and little-known National Security Agency collects, through electronic espionage, so much raw data that it sometimes needs to destroy tens of thousands of pounds of excess secret paper a day. How much, then, do they keep a day?” He also points to the CIA, FBI, IRS, and private companies including AT&T and “computerized credit companies” as dangers highlighted by Burnham’s book. What’s familiar in The Rise of the Computer State is the tone — one of suspicion, fear, and confusion around the government and what it controls. What’s different, of course, is that technology has advanced by leaps and bounds — maybe even faster than Burnham would have predicted — and our government has more invisible access to a greater volume of information about us than ever before. And yet Orwell, with his vivid imagination, was unable to foresee the actual shape of the threat that would exist in 1984. It turns out to be the ubiquitous computer and its ancillary communications networks. Without the malign intent of any government system or would-be dictator, our privacy is being invaded, and more and more of the experiences which should be solely our own are finding their way into electronic files that the curious can scrutinize at the punch of a button. The airline companies have a computer record of our travels — where we went and how long we stayed and, possibly, with whom we traveled. The car rental firms have a computer record of the days and distances we went afield. Hotel computers can fill in a myriad of detail about our stays away from home, and the credit card computers know a great deal about the meals we ate, and with how many guests. The computer files at the Internal Revenue Service, the Census Bureau, the Social Security Administration, the various security agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and our own insurance companies know everything here is to know about our economic, social and marital status, even down to our past illnesses and the state of our health. If — or is it when? — these computers are permitted to talk to one another, when they are interlinked, they can spew out a roomful of data on each of us that will leave us naked before whoever gains access to the information. This is the threat, with its many permutations, with which David Burnham deals here. His is not a polemic against the computers or those who program them, and here is full acknowledgment of the great benefits they can and are bringing to mankind. (For instance, we could not have gone to space without them, and they hold the potential for helping scientists conquer disease.) But we must be vigilant against their misuse, either accidentally or intentionally. The alarm is raised here that, while we are only too aware now of the danger of losing everything in a nuclear holocaust, there also is a danger of losing it all in the green glow from a little phosphor screen.
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