Comm455/History of Journalism

Remember the newspaper?

It used to come knocking at the door around six in the morning. It kept Dad busy for the first hour of the day. It made great wrapping paper and cushion for fragile pottery. Most of all, however, the newspaper did the most important job of keeping its readers informed.

“A newspaper owner gets a place at every table, access to all the top politicians’ ears, and the power to impose his worldview on his readers,” writes Jack Shafer in a 2009 article for Slate titled, “The Great Newspaper Crackup of 1918.”

The newspaper has recently suffered a few setbacks — namely, the Internet — and alas, it’s finally on its way out. Most journalist mourn the death of the newspaper, but I say, why not celebrate it?

The truth is while the newspaper is dying, journalism isn’t. In fact, I happen to believe that journalism is in a period of renaissance. The rebirth of word-of-mouth journalism in the form of blogging and micro-blogging has made way to a whole new wave of journalists that exert more creativity than any writer, editor or distributor of old news.

At the same time, we shouldn’t forget to celebrate the life of the newspaper, which, if you think about it, lasted an extremely long time. To be exact, if you include the tipao and the acta, the newspaper lived for well over 1,000 years. I’d say that’s a reason for praise.

One setback, however, of the rapid popularity and velocity of the Internet, is the cheapened state of journalism that the web has perpetuated. In a 2007 Wall Street Journal article titled, “Read All About It: How newspapers got into such a fix, and where they go from here,” Paul E. Steiger discusses the many implications of the death of newspapers and the rise of online journalism.

“Anyone with a fact, a comment, a snapshot or a video clip can self-publish and instantly compete with the professionals,” Steiger states.

With the opportunity to be a journalist being given to anyone and everyone, there is the fear that it will lead to a less-informed public. I happen to believe that the mass boom of online bloggers and word-of-mouth news will be more reliable than network news and newspapers. The reasoning is that social media is self-correcting. If an inaccuracy is published, someone else will come along and correct it. This domino effect will take place until the truth is out. The real danger (in my opinion) lies in trusting a single gatekeeper (or a select few) to keep the public informed.

Ever since its inception in the late 1990s, Google has been the issue of much debate in politics, economics and overall public welfare. From its humble beginnings as a PhD dissertation project to its current state as one of the United States’ most successful corporations, the little company that could is standing at the apex of what some may call the most revolutionary displays of entrepreneurship in decades.

Ken Auletta’s tell-all book, “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It,” is a product of countless hours put into researching the company’s inner workings after being granted full access to the executives, engineers and all the resources he needed to write a fair and balanced analysis of Google’s past, present and future.

After kicking it off with an anecdotal chapter about a Viacom executive who visits Google’s Mountain View campus to talk business with the company’s higher-ups only to realize that Google was not a company he wanted to associate with, Auletta delves into Google’s beginnings with a history of its birth.

While “Googled” does a great job highlighting the innovative aspect of the company’s efforts and their many areas of success, it also expresses Google’s many fallacies and flaws, one main one being their attachment to the concept of a utopian corporation. The company seemed to be made up of engineers, and the engineers answered to no one. This hindered their abilities to make crucial decisions about design, for example.

Another sensitive subject that the book addresses is the idea of Google creating an evil empire, sometimes accused of operating outside of the law, breaking copyright laws and angering publishers.

The chapter about Google Books highlights this aspect eloquently. The concern is that by making copyrighted material available for free, Google will drive writers and publishers out of business. The same concern holds true with Google News, which compiles articles from hundreds of sources and posts them right to the site. This makes Google News the powerful “middle man” between people and the news.

The most fascinating aspect of this book is Auletta’s account of Google’s impact on the advertising industry. Before Google, advertisers took a significant risk when purchasing ad space somewhere, not knowing exactly which part of their effort will succeed. Google targeted key words and search results to cater to advertisers so they would know exactly what worked. This allowed Google to charge them much less, and therefore make more business.

Whether Google is good or evil is still a question many people like to debate, but the real answer is subjective. Auletta’s book is a wonderful guide to forming an educated decision as to whether you want to think of Google as a world-dominating  monster who’s set out to drive writers, publishers and advertisers out of business or just a free-thinking group of engineers who always have the consumers’ needs in mind.

I just wanted to share one more thing.

This video is a depiction of how the story of Christmas would be different if it were happening today. It uses social media and the internet in a clever way.

I realize that it is religious and not all of us are of the same religion, but it is relevant to our class and the season.

Enjoy 🙂

Newspapers are dying, but the news lives on. Not only does the news live, but it thrives.

How? Newspapers have been the most mainstream news outlet for decades. If it is dying, how are people staying informed? What happened?

There are many factors that have contributed to newspaper’s demise. A lot of it has to do with the invention and popularity of the internet. Just as the invention of the printing press was influential in the distribution of the newspaper, the internet is a vehicle for news to travel. It has proved to be a much faster, more immediate way to reach consumers.

This happens to technology all the time. It’s not long before a new and improved something comes along to replace a gadget that used to be cutting edge.

According to L. Gordon Crovitz of The Wall Street Journal, this isn’t the first and only time something like this has happened. A lot of media tools have evolved from other forms of communication. The development of the early telegraph is a prime example. The biggest fact about it is that we don’t use the telegraph today. The telephone come along and replaced it. Crovitz did mention that nothing has seen a disruption (like the one to newspapers) happen at this rate.

Samuel Morse's telegraph (Source: Wikipedia)

However, there is much to say to the fact that newspapers have lasted through some of the inventions that have been introduced during its reign. Newspapers were widely accepted before televisions were mainstream. The television newscast came along and has threatened the newspaper as its top competition. They seemed to form some sort of a partnership as of late. They work hand in hand and feed off each other.

Like with the printing press, the right equipment is required to participate and contribute to the news. When the printing press was new, they were hard to come by. They weren’t available to everyone. You had to be rich to have one, but if you did, you were the gatekeeper for anything that press printed. Now, anybody with a computer and internet connection can add to the information that is out there.

People have always felt the need to know what is going on around them and how it will impact their lives. With the internet and all of its tools, it is surprisingly easy. The emergence of the “Twitterverse” and “Blogosphere” have allowed news consumers to not only have that immediacy, but share and react with each other in a way that newspapers hinder.

So to answer the question I posed in the beginning of this post, I think time is killing newspapers. Time contributed to it’s invention and it was only a matter of time before something (and in this case somethings) has come to replace it. It is not possible to point a finger at any ONE electronic media outlet. It’s the combination of every new way to get the news faster.

Another way to look at this time answer is to call newspapers slow. Classic newspapers are the slowest outlet to produce the news. With Blogs and Twitter, there is no deadline. The news is ever-changing. And if there IS a deadline, blogs can be updated and a new Tweet can be written. Print is print. Ink cannot be erased.

(Photo courtesy of www.esquire.com)

Before going into the death of Borders and the changes in the ways we publish and consume written works, it is important to understand how we got here.

computersmiths.com

It all goes back to 618 where the Chinese — not Gutenberg — invented block printing to reproduce copies of the tipao. The tipao were official newsletters and used to spread news to elite groups within the Chinese Empire. Then…not a whole lot happened for awhile.

Image via Wikipedia

It wasn’t until 1450 when Johann Gutenberg famously invented and used his letter press that things would begin to change around the world. Fast forward another 70 years to 1517 when Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses. The press would play a pivotal role in ensuring that his ideas would not die with a simple book-burning or excommunication.

Instead of painstakingly reproducing copies of books and other written works by hand, it was now easy to use the press to publish. The introduction and proper utilization of the press into societies with low literacy rates makes it one of the most important inventions of human history. With more books available, more people had access to them and information was flowing faster than ever before.

If we go back to the fifth century, Sumerian clay tablets have been discovered in tact. On one of these tablets, a letter discusses the author’s confidence that clay tablets will never be replaced for papyrus.

“They have a rich earthy smell and make for heft in one’s hands. Papyrus will never take the place of clay.”

Image via Wikipedia

Sound familiar?

Eerily familiar in fact.

Print is dying just as clay died many thousands of years ago. Tablets (the new kind, not the clay kind) are gaining more users and many are reading exclusively on E-Readers and Kindles. These devices, shaped like tablets, allow for users to store and purchase many books without…well…the book. It is all saved on a hard drive and accessible anytime — as long as your device is charged!

We are experiencing a change in the playing field, and a pretty big one. Print has been dominant for centuries, so it will be a challenging and interesting transition to digital. Print will stay around, probably as more of a novelty than anything else, but the bulk of published work will be designed and published for consumers using electronic readers and other similar devices.

cnet.com

It is funny to see how everything comes full-circle. Tablets to papyrus to the printing press and now back to tablets. What’s next?

Let me take you back to a time when news was not instantaneous. When news was spread by paperboys on street corners and families would learn of the happenings of the world from a piece of paper in the morning and a television set at night.

Life in the 1960’s in America, during the height of the newspaper industry, was an exciting time.

Technology and Journalism.

The two words go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Journalism as a whole has been influenced by technology greatly over the past hundreds of years. The biggest enhancement has been the velocity at which news is delivered and distributed. As technology has gotten better and better, the speed of news has gone up exponentially.

In the 1990s a new technological innovation, the Internet, began to creep its way into the business of journalism. It started off slowly, as publications one by one tried moving content online. Now it would be difficult to find someone who does not use the Internet to gather news, whether it is the only medium or not.

The best part of online journalism may be that it can be corrected. In a print paper, if a mistake is made it can’t be fixed until the next issue. Online, a mistake can be corrected seconds, minutes, hours or days later. Because of this self-correction, Wikipedia has become a credible source for information. Almost anything you can think of is on Wikipedia, because anyone can post on it. Some may feel that this citizen journalism is false more often than not. However, Wikipedia allows any user to correct pages and sources are posted at the bottom of the page.

Read More…

Harold Ross and Henry Luce may not ring a bell but The New Yorker and Time magazine probably do. Ross and Luce were publishing rivals that shared one common goal: success.

Read More…

The world had long operated under the logical assumption that if you wanted your news to spread, you or someone else had to get themselves out there and spread it yourselves. There was no magic string connecting one town with another by which news, ideas, and trade could be spread. That was ludicrous… Read More…

America’s pastime.

The father must be one of the all-time great players like Ruth, Mantle, or Aaron.

Wrong.

The father of the game is none other than Henry Chadwick. Chadwick was the first ever sports reporter.

But beyond that, Chadwick was a pioneer of baseball, as stated on his Hall of Fame plaque. He enhanced the game by inventing the box score and also writing the first rule-book. He brought forth statistics like batting average and Earned Run Average, staples of the game today.

Chadwick was absolutely instrumental in the spread of baseball. He wrote a book in 1868 called “The Game of Base Ball.” He died in 1908 but his legacy lives on. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 1938.

Baseball would not be America’s Pastime without the help of Chadwick. If it were not for him the game might look entirely different or not even exist at all.

Texting has become our way of communicating to multiple people simultaneously. We can talk to someone on Facebook, have a real time conversation, and text all at the same time. While this broad channel allows us to more efficiently spread the ideas and thoughts that we want spread, the time and energy to make these thoughts grammatically correct just is not there.

While we can hold those three simultaneous communications exchanges, what we write will reflect the hurry with which we wrote it. Short hand has been around for centuries, and serves the legal and business communities well. Without it, the stenographer in a courtroom would never be able to keep accurate and reliable notes. But one needs to learn how to write intelligently before they learn shorthand.

Over the course of a person’s life in this age, the vast majority of what they will write will never be graded as it is mostly personal correspondence, much of it on the internet, and by telephone. When the style of that majority of their writing shifts from plain English to TXT, they will become better versed at “abbreving” than at writing. While our educational system is assumably becoming better through the application of technology to the classroom, Trending Studies show that from 1973 to 2011 that average SAT Critical Reading Scores have dropped over 30 points. When I peruse my own Facebook, I can find in the front feed, over 20 grammar/mechanics/spelling errors that any 3rd grader could tell you were wrong.

Let’s perform an experiment. The next sentence will be typed in plain English; while the next paragraph will be a carbon copy of the same idea but translated into modern texting shorthand. Picture this message going out with the address saying “2DA Ambasdr frm GRMny”

With problems confronting the United States today that require more and better communications skill with our international partners, the last thing that we need to do is dumb down our messages to the point of being incomprehensible.

W probs confronting d United st8z 2day dat Rquire mor n btr comms skill W r intl prtners, d lst thng dat we nd 2 doS dum dwn r msgs 2 d point of bn incomprehensible. (apparently there is not a txt counterpart for incomprehensible)

I just downloaded the WordPress app on my iPhone. I’ll preface this blog by saying I will not be making any corrections to my bad typing other than what autocorrect does by default. With no other way to access theninternet I am left holding onto my phone. This is true stream of consciousness typing.

This app is very bare bones. You can do basic things like bold and link, add quotes, click to show more and even add video and photos.

I can literally post on the go, with all the same functionality I would have on a real computer. This is a handy tool for any online journalist who uses WordPress for their blogging platform.

I was able to take a picture and insert it without any hassle. I could also make a short video on my phone and post that.

As a journalist using WordPress a lot, I see it being a handy tool for when you’re on the go.