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Archive for December 2, 2009

Covering Catastrophe — Review

Posted by: | December 2, 2009 | No Comment |

One common question TV viewers may have when watching a breaking news story unfold is: “What’s it like to be there?” That question is answered in “Covering Catastrophe: Broadcast Journalists Report September 11,” a collection of personal accounts recalling that bad day. Allison Gilbert, co-editor, conceived the idea by journaling her experience while covering the […]

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Early newspapers were not the most organized. Facts, the most important part of a news story, were often burried deep in a story and difficult to find. The inverted pyramid changed that completely and made things much easier on the reader. American journalists found that telegraphs could be unreliable. They developed a system of transmitting […]

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There are three sections in this chapter. The first is called “Losing Faith in the Democratic Market Society.” Basically, this section talked about how people did not have a good feeling about how well democracy was going to work. Some people felt like a dictatorship might be better because, as Nicholas Murray Butler put it, dictatorship “appears […]

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In Chapter 5 of Michael Schudson book titled “ Discovering the News”, Schudson discusses the use and criticism of objectivity in  the 1960s, and the two criticisms journalism dealt with in the 1960s . The chapter begins by stating that objectivity was heavily criticized and abused from journalists, reporters, and readers. Journalists thought that objective […]

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A Jewish newspaper in America

Posted by: | December 2, 2009 | No Comment |

The ethnic press must be discussed somewhat independently from other American newspapers.  Many ethnicities have a unique newspaper encompassing their cultures and communities.  The Jewish community is no exception to this. The first Hebrew and Yiddish newspaper appeared in America in 1871, and there are still newspapers specific to the Jewish community today.  The arguably […]

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In Schudson’s, Discovering the News chapter 1, he goes into great depth about the penny press and how it transformed journalism from 1830 and on. He describes the 1830’s as a revolution in journalism; one that “led to a triumph of ‘news’ over the editorial and ‘facts’ over opinion.” Before 1830, party press and commercial […]

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“The ideal of objectivity”

Posted by: | December 2, 2009 | No Comment |

Objectivity, a mainstay to modern journalism, was not always present in early American newspapers — nor was it expected. “Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers” considers objectivity’s role in American newspapers from the early days of the Penny Press to the 1970’s. Author Michael Schudson‘s introduction lays the groundwork for what will […]

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Not until the 1890s were reporters truly regarded as necessities to the newspaper world.  Regardless of popular belief it was not the Civil War that set this new practice into motion.  Journalism was already heading in a new direction, and it was the papers of New York that would ultimately take it there. The drama […]

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When people think of the term, “muckraker,” what comes to mind are some of the people that changed the history of the world forever.  Some of those people include Nellie Bly, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Upton Sinclair, and plenty of others.  According to the dictionary, a muckraker is someone who seeks to expose corruption […]

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During a recent class discussion,  I addressed a classroom full of peers concerning an important element of Mitchell Stephens book “A History of News.” The chapter revolved around the intricate question of whether or not news becomes better with better technologies–and if not then what exactly are we losing. Essentially, Stephens argues that from the mid twentieth century […]

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