The Wayward Press Critic

Showing my students how to blog

2009-12-03T10:15:00.001-05:00

This is a blog post. This is how you link.

We've moved down the block

2009-07-21T15:46:00.002-04:00

Blogger was good training wheels for learning how to do this whole blogging thing, but now that I'm re-committed to keeping my blog current, I've moved over to WordPress, which is more powerful and more professional. The WordPress version of this blog is still a work in progress (though that's sort of the definition of a blog anyway) but it's already a better, more readable blog than this one was. And all of the old posts (except for this one) have been ported over there.

So meet me and The Wayward Press Critic 2.0 at: http://kevinmlerner.wordpress.com/.

My personal movie critic

2009-07-20T17:47:00.001-04:00

I tweeted a few weeks ago about the New York Observer firing my favorite movie critic, Andrew Sarris, and a week ago, the NY Times ran an article calling him a "survivor of film criticism's heroic age."

But I hardly care about Sarris championing auteur theory or about his rivalry with Pauline Kael (even though I learned all about those things in perhaps the greatest course I've taken at any level of my education, "The Critic as Journalist and Essayist," taught by Mike Janeway at Columbia Journalism). Sarris was more important to me because he somehow seemed to share my movie tastes exactly.

I always feel validated when I see that he likes a movie that I desperately want to like before it comes out (say, Kill Bill vol. 1, which made his top ten list in 2003), and I'm always intrigued when he likes a movie I thought looked like real clunkers (say, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, which Sarris and I might be alone in liking). And he picks out little-known ones that I wouldn't have known whether to like or not (Croupier, for instance, which introduced us to Clive Owen).

It's not foolproof. I find choices like A Beautiful Mind vaguely embarrassing, even if they are critically lauded. And I won't stand by him for putting Dr. T & The Women on a top ten list. But on the whole, we agree. And he surveys the field, without snobbery, but with taste, helping me find movies that I'll like, even if they're not the big box office winners. And even sometimes in spite of being big box office winners.

And that's all you can really ask of a critic.

By the way, see The Hurt Locker. If you're curious about it. Deserves the hype.

Similar thoughts from Clay Shirky, who is smarter than I am

2009-07-17T16:09:00.002-04:00

I had this article by Clay Shirky up in my browser while writing that last post, but hadn't yet read it. I think it touches on some of the same idea of "value" as my previous post, though Shirky calls it "leverage."

"The View from Nowhere," intellectual property, and something called "value"

2009-07-16T20:20:00.004-04:00

I hate to cite Mediaite, both because I dislike the word, and also because it's de rigeur these days to either criticize or mock Dan Abrams and his site.

But here goes.

This story exemplifies something I started thinking about last night while listening to Jeff Jarvis's Media Talk USA. In the Mediaite story, Rachel Sklar and Zeke Turner ask why no one gives Sy Hersh credit for breaking the story that the CIA had been running "death squads" and that Dick Cheney had been hiding them from Congress. Hersh had chatted about them in his odd, casual, not-quite-on-the-record way at the University of Minnesota four months ago. Now, when the NY Times "breaks" the story again, they don't give any credit at all to Hersh.

What this brings to my mind is something called "value." And I don't think I mean monetary value when I say that. What I'm trying to get at is more along the lines of the value of a piece of news to a culture. Because clearly, Hersh isn't going to be any wealthier if the Times agrees that yes, Hersh got there first.

In the Media Talk USA podcast, this came up with regard to judge Richard Posner's suggestion that copyright protection be extended to newspapers online. Jarvis and his guests, Gawker's Nick Denton and the Wall Street Journal's Alan Murray, summed up Posner's idea this way: put a 24-hour embargo on any piece of news reported in one outlet before any other outlet can pick it up or discuss it.

This is obviously ludicrous for several reasons (some of which Jarvis, Murray and Denton point out). Chief for me, though, is the idea that a single piece of news, in its simplest form (i.e., "event x occurred"), has almost no value anymore. They discuss this in regard to who reported Michael Jackson's death first. They all agree that it was the gossip site TMZ that got there first, but they also note that most "mainstream media" outlets cited the Los Angeles Times instead. Now, these MSM were wrong to do that in exactly the same way that the NY Times was wrong for neglecting to mention Seymour Hersh. But here is why it doesn't matter at the same time as it matters: I'm not going to start trusting TMZ for most information in the same way I'm going to trust the LA Times. Why not? Well, the LA Times has earned something over time, not just with one scoop. And for me, the LA Times is more likely to have the sort of information that I, as an over-educated slightly snobby urban dweller is going to want to read over time. Both outlets eventually added value to this one tidbit. For TMZ, it was intense, sensational detail. For the LA Times (and the NY Times and NPR and on and on) it was more meta-coverage: a detailed obituary; an analysis of his place in American culture; coverage of the coverage.

And this is why I think Posner's idea is so laughable. A piece of news isn't copyrightable. If something happened, it happened. Copyright is about creation. And the opinion and analysis that make up the added value of coverage of Michael Jackson's death are more important to me than where the first word of it came from. That layer of news doesn't seem to have much value anymore--and I think news outlets should cede it. Social networks, citizen journalism and other things we don't know about yet are going to continue to tell us about events that occur. Events that occur shouldn't be the stuff of news organizations anymore. Investigative journalism does. Scrabbling, cynical, ask-the-tough-questions journalism does, too.

I use the phrase "the view from nowhere" in the title of this post. It's Jay Rosen's formulation of the attitude of objectivity that has been traditionally favored by the US MSM for 100+ years. And it's the sort of attitude that works really well for event-that-occurred journalism. But wouldn't there be much more value in analytical journalism in the case of events like this? Because while you can steal a fact, or even steal an idea, the act of creation--which is what copyright protects, after all--isn't something that comes from readily-available news. Michael Jackson died. If TMZ didn't get that, someone would have, and it wouldn't have taken 20 minutes longer to do so. Protect investigative reports. Protect opinion and analysis pieces. But don't protect "news."

One last thought, as an adjunct to this. Don't protect summaries of other people's work on this, either. For example, I'll tell you this: Frank Bruni was a bulimic when he was a kid. Did I just ruin this Sunday's NY Times Magazine cover story for you? No. For the same reason that story, an excerpt from Bruni's memoir, didn't ruin the memoir. If you don't know who Frank Bruni is, you won't click (unless the phrase "baby bulimic" intrigues you regardless of the author). If you know who he is, but don't care, you've absorbed a tiny piece of information about Bruni, and you probably wouldn't have rushed to your newsstand on Sunday to buy a copy anyway. If you do care, you probably already clicked on the link, and I just brought the Times another reader rather than stole one from them.

--
And since this post is all about giving credit where credit is due, let me note that my views on intellectual property are strongly influenced by Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture, and my views on the role of media in the national conversation of a representative democracy operate in the shadow of the life work of the late scholar James Carey.

A more reasoned look at j-schools

2009-07-16T01:58:00.002-04:00

C.W. Anderson posted a version of a talk he gave recently on the future of j-schools. While I don't necessarily agree with every point, this is a person I could have a reasonable discussion with--unlike the boobery of the kill-j-school-now crowd. A brief excerpt of his argument:

A paradox of the current media moment is that, while journalism jobs are disappearing, j-school enrollment is up? Why? I believe its because people are curious about the media, practically oriented, and fundamentally want to both understand and contribute meaningfully to the world around them. Over the next decade, fewer people may become “journalists” than ever before, but more people than ever will commit “acts of journalism.” To thrive, j-school must understand this and embrace it. Journalism school will stay relevant by training students to produce publicly meaningful content in a world of rampant media making, DIY content, and fragmentation.

Anderson gives some of his talk over to the differences between grad school in journalism and undergrad journalism. He suggests turning the basic reporting and writing class (RW1, at Columbia) into a required course for all incoming freshmen, not for journalism master's students. Not a terrible idea, though I think for most of those undergrads, a media consumption course would be much more important than a media production course. Or just give them all a copy of my favorite book.

Two web comments about J-schools (one an editor's choice!)

2009-07-15T22:05:00.003-04:00

I haven't been blogging much on my own blog, but in the last few months, I've come across two articles/blog posts on other sites that got my dander up enough for me to comment.

Herewith, those two responses. First one was a response to an article on New York Magazine's Daily Intel site. The article, by Erica Orden, is called "Columbia J-School's Existential Crisis," and dealt with Columbia's integration of technology into their curriculum.

I can't find a way to link directly to my response, so I'm copying and pasting it here:

.... I happen to be in the middle of week devoted to writing my doctoral qualifying exams: a 20-page paper devoted to the "profession" of journalism, and another 20-pager on the history of journalism education. (I'm also a Columbia J-School grad, and a former professor of one of The Local's interns).

J-schools have long been too tied to the idea that they are training people for jobs in "the profession," which was a slightly disingenuous premise anyway, since journalism has long been less of a profession and more of an industry. Reporters are, for the most part, employees, with a veneer of professionalism.

But what [previous commenter] TIFFANYB2 gets exactly right is that the core practices and premises of journalism are much more important than learning about the 21st-century equivalent of the typesetting and stenography courses that the first j-programs taught.

The industry seems to be collapsing, but the practice of journalism will survive, and delinking the practitioners from the industry will only be to the benefit of the former and of the public at large. This is a HUGE opportunity for leading J-schools like Columbia and CUNY and NYU to reopen the dialogue between people who actually DO journalism and the people who are paid to think about it. Yes, there are some drunk-with-Didion profs there, but there are also terrifically experienced working journalists (who STILL work) and first-rate scholars like Schudson and Gitlin and the late James Carey. Through conversation, they can help reshape the practice of journalism in the face of these generational changes.

And sure, they can Twitter about it as they do--if it helps the conversation; technology is a tool.

Read Pulitzer's defense of the J-school in the 1904 North American Review. It's actually quite noble.

BY KLERNER on 03/12/2009 at 2:02am

The second article came this morning, and riled me up enough to sign up for a Huffington Post username so that I could respond. That post was called "Close the J-Schools." It rehashed all of the tired arguments against journalism school that I analyzed in a 40+ page paper that I finished recently. I had so much to say in response to it that I had to edit down to exactly the maximum word count for a HuffPo comment.

And I'm proud to say that of the 78 (and counting) comments on the original post, mine is the only "HuffPosts's Pick" among them. You can link directly to my comment here or read it, pasted below.

This article--like dozens before it--is ill considered, reactionary, and intellectually lazy. But let me grant you a few points:

First, you're right that business schools are more likely to come up with business models than j-schools. But shouldn't that be? J-schools should be more interested in developing models for gathering and distributing information.

Second, you're right that *most* j-schools now are overly focused on training students for the *trade* of journalism. If they continue to devote energy to rinkydink news services and classes on how to use current technologies, then they will always be training second-rate journalists and will always be a step behind.

But huge enrollments are an opportunity, not a reason to close schools and save ill-advised potential journalists from themselves. Journalism schools need to rethink their mission, which should be just what you dismiss out of hand as obviously useless: "mandatory classes in media history, communications theory or journalism philosophy." These are not courses that justify journalism as an academic subject, but instead are the sort of courses that can turn the most promising aspiring journalists into critical and creative thinkers with an understanding of the foundations and principles of their calling--not just flinty, curmudgeonly cynics.

So delink journalism schools from the industry and use the best professors to guide the best students toward new solutions that will advance the cause of journalism without regard to the lumbering and dying industry that has supported it for 180 years.

This article has never appeared in print

2008-08-07T12:04:00.001-04:00

The NY Times has started, in the last week or so, to note when an article on nytimes.com has appeared in print. It gives the date, the section, and the page number.

I don't know what prompted this change, or what good it does, unless you're trying to put together a bibliography for an academic paper and still think the print edition holds more authority than the web version.

Maybe the Times still thinks that way, too.

Great moments in the intellectual history of journalism?

2008-08-06T11:58:00.003-04:00

I was working on my PowerPoint for my presentation today at the AEJMC convention, trying to find online photos of University of Wisconsin journalism instruction pioneer Willard Bleyer and found a Wisconsin page that mentioned that he and First Amendment theorist and philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn overlapped in their time at Wisconsin, and that both were involved in Wisconsin's Experimental College, which Meiklejohn founded.

Bleyer was one of the most academically-minded early journalism educators (as opposed to the professional-instruction crowd), and Meiklejohn is a 20th-Century bigwig in the First. I wonder if there's a paper in this, one of those meeting-of-the-minds sorts of things like The Metaphysical Club.

ProPublica's daily email

2008-07-31T19:24:00.002-04:00

I really like a lot of what ProPublica is doing. I think the not-for-profit model is a good idea, if not the future of professional journalism. And I don't just say this because I met Paul Steiger in his last week at the WSJ.

But their daily email is impossible to read. It's like a poorly designed web page, not an email. I'd even rather they email me their whole web page. I've subscribed since they went live, and I still don't understand exactly where to look for what, and what's original material.

I'm officially unsubscribing, and just reading their posts in my RSS reader instead.

FCC, see-ya!

2008-07-21T21:11:00.002-04:00

Proposition, in re the "wardrobe malfunction" decision:

The Federal Communications Commission is at best an out-of-touch relic from an earlier era (that of the "mass media") and at worst is unconstitutional.

Discuss.

I'm (going to be) Huge in Japan

2008-07-10T17:57:00.004-04:00

So sometimes I ride my bike around Central Park. And when I do, I often like to pull off at West 100th Street, which is one of my favorite parts of the Park, and I buy a bottle of water.

Today, I did that, and as I was getting off my bike, I was approached by a really friendly Japanese film crew, in a way that told me they wanted to talk. Usually, I'm not into that, and mutter something about being in the media myself, though I don't really know why that would matter. They wanted me to pose on my bike, but that wouldn't look so good, so I stood in front of it, and made sure that my helmet was off, since even Lance Armstrong looks stupid in a bike helmet.

Anyway, the very bubbly woman who interviewed me told me that it was for a Japanese TV show or documentary (she said both, though I'm not sure which is right, exactly).

About raccoons.

And strangely enough, I have a good New York raccoon story. Several weeks ago, maybe two months, I was walking back to my apartment from Central Park West, and I heard scuffling on the metal pole of the construction scaffolding I was standing under. I looked to my right, and there, grasping desperately to the vertical pole, right at my eye level, was a 40-pound raccoon. He was having some trouble climbing, since his claws couldn't get a grip on the metal. We stared at each other for a solid few seconds, as if to say to each other, "hey man, I don't want any trouble..." And then he managed to hoist himself up to the crossbar, at which point he had much more mobility. And since he might very well have had rabies, too, I moved on.

I was less articulate in my retelling for Japanese TV, but I think I got the gist across. I couldn't tell, as I was talking, if the host was laughing because she thought my story was funny or because she wanted me to look comfortable on camera, but I didn't really mind being patronized, if I was. I asked why they were curious about raccoons, and she told me that, apparently, Tokyo has a raccoon problem. People kept them as pets (really? a raccoon?), then couldn't handle them and released them into the streets.

They thanked me and moved on to a little old New York-y woman who passed by and talked in a loud Noo Yawk drawl. She talked longer than the film crew was interested in her, and the camera man took to shooting B-roll of the inside of a trash can instead.

So if anyone out there sees a sweaty guy in a gray University of Pennsylvania t-shirt talking about raccoons on a Japanese tv show (and I have a two-week growth of beard, so I probably look a bit like a big rodent myself), let me know. I'd be curious to know what comes of this.

Blogging my quals

2008-07-05T15:15:00.002-04:00

My main task this summer, besides prepping three courses for my new gig, is to begin reading for my qualifying exams. I haven't set a date, but I'm probably going to take them in the spring, likely over spring break at Seton Hall, when I won't have teaching commitments to interfere with writing.

Between now and then, I need to do a lot of reading, and a lot of note-taking. I think that in order to keep myself honest and not piddle away the rest of the summer, I'm going to start blogging my reading list. I've set a goal of 150 pages per day. I think it's reasonable on most days to expect that.

I don't know what these posts are going to look like. Maybe short summaries combined with commentary, like formal annotated bibliographies or short response papers. Maybe just notes and thoughts on ideas they inspire for my dissertation.

But if you happen to read this, and think you might want to follow along, you're likely to see a whole lot of U.S. journalism history covered here, particularly the intellectual history of American journalism (which is a theme I may take up in the dissertation), and the history of journalism education. There will also be a lot of First Amendment reading, which will be the biggest subset of the intellectual history of American journalism reading that I'm doing.

First off, I'm going to re-read E.H. Carr's 'What is History?' which I read at the beginning of David Greenberg's media history seminar at Rutgers. I think a good philosophical look at historiography is a good way to start.

Lorber or hate her

2008-05-05T13:28:00.004-04:00

We media types seem to be obsessed--not quite to a creepy extent--with MTV's The Paper, a "reality" show about a high school newspaper in Broward County, Florida. And I'll admit to being one of them. I never worked on my high school paper (that was mostly the province of a classmate I barely knew who seriously used the byline--granted, based on his real name--I.P. Lakes), but I did devote 1998 almost entirely to my undergraduate newspaper's weekly entertainment magazine. So I know what the publication obsession is like. Most of my best friends from college were from the Daily Pennsylvanian or 34th Street, the magazine I edited.

I don't see myself in the characters, but I do see some potentially pernicious caricatures. Chuck Barney pointed out the fairly obvious "bitch" characterization of Amanda Lorber, the editor of the paper. But I don't think there's much reason to hope that this will drive kids into j-schools. The paper is almost absent in the paper. You could almost substitute the Latin club for The Circuit, and have the same ambitious, smart, nerdy kids jockeying for control so that it will look good on their college apps.

But these kids aren't just smart. They're white. They're wealthy. And what's even more subversive, they're surprisingly Jewish. They're Jewish in a pretty secular way--no one's running around in a skullcap and a prayer shawl--but they toss off casual references to remembering Hebrew school. I'd like to think that this would help show the world (i.e., MTV viewers) that Jewish kids are just like any other, but as a half Jew myself, I can't help but wonder if this will just perpetuate Jews-in-the-media stereotypes instead.

Am I really concerned? Probably not. Will I still watch Amanda scheme and the rest of them scheme against Amanda? Yeah, I will. In the end, will it matter much one way or the other? Again, probably not.

But media types love nothing more than to watch and write about media types. Just look at me.

But frankly, I think they should move The Circuit completely online. It would more accurately reflect the world they're going to go into--if they go into journalism at all.

Professionalization Without Standardization: Journalism Education, Voice, and Democracy

2008-03-26T00:05:00.005-04:00

I attended two conferences a week ago on a sort of crazy schedule: Auburn, Alabama on Friday afternoon; back in New York City for conference number two on Saturday morning. But I presented two papers I care quite strongly about.

Friday's paper was the first in what I hope will be a series developing a theory of the First Amendment based on one of my media theory heroes, the late Jim Carey. I call it a "Conversation Model" of the First Amendment, one that is rooted in the cultural studies idea that conversation constitutes culture--or the idea that we are a product of our interactions with each other, our environment, and with various media. It's a theory that I think encourages individual voices.

Saturday morning, I presented my history of American journalism schools from the end of the Civil War to the founding of Columbia's J-school in 1912. My thesis there is that journalism didn't take up the opportunity to solidify itself as a professional school when others (law, medicine, education, and on and on) did, fusing Progressivism, German universities' ideas of research and the burgeoning middle-class professionalism.

Bt as I was gathering material for yet another paper that I plan to write (this one analyzing the robust history of anti-J-school rants), I had the idea that the real problem with journalism school is that it doesn't teach ideals; that it teaches standards. And standardization is the enemy of voice. And voice is the primary component of conversation. And conversation is essential to Democracy. And a free press is the great bulwark of liberty.

(The impetus for this link was an essay by Ron Rosenbaum on a wonderful NYU compilation of essays about J-school.)

So here is the challenge to myself. Three things I need to write now:

1. That analysis of the anti-J-school rant.
2. An essay (or maybe a reported article, even for the mainstream media?) about how the Columbia J-school revitalization (which spawned that NYU online colloquium) got derailed--telling the story from Lee Bollinger's halting of the dean search in 2002 until Nick Lemann's (accidental?) release of his self-evaluation a couple of months ago.
3. My dissertation, fully exploring the links between democracy and the education of journalists.

Maybe that last one is too ambitious. But I like ambitious.

Anyway, the implications of this for journalism instructors: teach the democratic implications. Don't stifle the voice with "technique."

It's not a fully-formed idea. Feel free to pick it apart.

Discovering the Schudson

2007-10-13T20:16:00.000-04:00

Giving the keynote address today was MacArthur "genius" and author of Discovering the News (which is probably the one book I cite in everything I've ever written), Michael Schudson. He gave props to my professor David Greenberg in addressing his topic--the history of frankness (Greenberg is writing a history of spin. That's the joke).

He started off with some amusingly disparaging talk about theory. In short, theories are always wrong. If we, as researchers, do our jobs, we will eventually prove every theory--wrong. And yet, theories are useful to us as a way of organizing, as a way of figuring out what the "story" is. I scribbled down this thought of his:

"We want a simple world. But it's not clear that simpler is better."

The actual thesis of his talk was interesting, as was a comment raised by my professor Deepa Kumar, but for me, that quote was the takeaway.

The return of rewrite

2007-10-13T14:47:00.001-04:00

I just attended the first half (of what I plan to attend) of an anniversary conference for my graduate school, SCILS at Rutgers. The panel was "Journalism Education at Rutgers: Past, Present, Future, ad the Challenges for Journalists in the Digital Age."

Doesn't sound thrilling, but for someone like me who find journalism education fascinating and frustrating, it is--well, OK, not thrilling, but at least worth a Saturday train ride out to New Brunswick. I was particularly taken with two panelists:

Patti Domm, CNBC's Executive News Editor, Markets and Economy
and
Dave Pettit, Deputy Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal Online.

They got into a bit of a discussion about journalism education's dependence on "silos," meaning that students choose print, or broadcast or "new media" as a sort of major when they study journalism. They seem to agree that silos are bad since the skills of a modern journalist cross all of these categories. I wonder (and asked) if it is the journalism school's job to teach technology at all. Technically, I was a "magazine" concentrator in grad school, and while I worked for a magazine for a few years, I edited their web site, and any html I know, I picked up somewhere other than J-school. The answer seems to be that student journalists need to learn the core of the profession first--news gathering, analysis, storytelling techniques. But that given a choice between hiring a good journalist without the tech skills and with the tech skills--well, it's obvious who would get the job. Train for the tech skills of the present, they say, but warn students that the present isn't going to last very long.

Pettit also said something in passing that I think would make for a great CJR article, and if I can figure out how to pitch it, I will. He was talking about new job categories, and he mentioned that WSJ.com is hiring rewrite people. Just like the 1920's urban newspapers, where the reporter would run out of the courtroom, duck into a phone booth, and yell "get me rewrite!" Apart from the interesting historical pendulum swing, and the fact that I'd LOVE to be a rewrite man (all the thrill of deadline newswriting without any of the pesky reporting!), this speaks to the separation in skills that I've always seen at the heart of journalism: reporting and writing are different things, and there's no reason to believe that any one person will be blessed with talent in both.

If Mike Hoyt (a former adjunct professor of mine, actually) sees this, he can feel free to offer me a freelance contract.

I'll end with notes on some points John Pavlik, another one of the panelists, and the chair of the Rutgers Journalism and Media Studies Department (my home department) made:

Four trends in the effect of technology on news (Pavlik, 2007):

1. New tools are changing the way journalism gets done. cf. the reporting out of Myanmar, done by cell phone cameras.
2. Relationships between media and their audiences are changing, in that things are much less authoritarian, and much more participatory.
3. The kinds of stories we tell are changing: look at ChicagoCrime.org, which turns the old idea of a police blotter into something decidedly 21st Century.
4. The management and culture of news organizations are changing. Less hierarchy. Less division between web and print. New financial systems.

AND, Four implications of this for journalism schools (ibid):

1. Move away from silos into more integration of technology into all classes.
2. More collaboration with press associations and the media industries.
3. Facilitation of life-long learning for graduates.
4. Teaching and encouragement of innovation and entrepreneurship to students (teach them how to run their own self-sustaining blog, f'rinstance).

All of this could work quite well as a final chapter of my dissertation. I'll get back to you on that, I suppose.

Celebrity

2006-07-16T21:29:00.000-04:00

I tried to think of a way to make this post have something to do with the media or with education--maybe something about how the media make a celebrity a culture or somesuch. But really, I just thought it was cool that I saw Alex Rodriguez at 61st and Madison today. I regret not stopping to ask for an autograph, but he was with a woman, and obviously on his way to dinner. It seemed gauche.

It does make me at least momentarily regret also not taking my job with the Yankees. Alas, I guess I'll just stick with academia.

I saw Keanu Reeves last week, actually. I don't regret not getting his autograph nearly as much.

The Applied Liberal Arts

2006-07-10T22:10:00.000-04:00

As I sat in my qualitative research methods class this Spring, I thought a lot about the intersection between various ways of gathering and creating knowledge in the world. It's not the first time I've thought about these overlaps, either. What a journalist does when gathering information is not necessarily all that different from what a doctor does, in some ways, for instance. Asking questions, putting together narratives, et cetera. And when I'm teaching the research paper in my intro classes at LaGuardia Community College, I make some of the same connections. Adding up the collective knowledge of the world, shaking it around a little bit, adding your own insights... Voila, a new contribution to that collective knowledge.

But then this started to become a little bit more solid as Harty Mokros's qualitative class. We started discussing ethnography--the research tool of the anthropolgist. The researcher immerses herself in a culture, and makes her research breakthroughs by writing down her experiences. This isn't really any different than some of the best journalism. You go to a place where news is happening. You experience. You describe. Maybe there are no footnotes, but it's the same approach to information gathering.

When I was an undergraduate, I took a sociology course. It was my freshman year, and I was attracted to the idea of a course about deviance and social control. I did OK, but I didn't really get it. The same thing happened--I forget if it was freshman or sophomore year--when I took cultural anthropology. For one thing, I didn't understand the fundamental difference between sociology and anthro--aren't they studying the same subject matter? Why are they different departments? At the time, I didn't think about it enough to figure it out. But the difference isn't in what sociologists and anthropologists study; it's in how they study it. Anthropologists do what I outlined above. Sociologists rely more on surveys and statistics.

This all may sound simple to people who figured this out long ago, but it's all apropos to finding a place in academia for journalism. Journalists can learn quite a bit from all of these research methods. The nature of journalism doesn't require quite the same rigor that academe does, however. At the same time, academics can learn from journalists, too. There's a grittiness that they bring, and a voice that allows journalists to translate complex ideas for a general audience.

I've come up with a nascent theory that journalism could function in the academy as a sort of applied liberal arts, in the same way that doctors practice applied chemistry and biology and anatomy and engineers practice applied physics and accountants practice applied mathematics, in a way. A liberal arts education provides the sort of broad knowledge base that journalists work with every day. There's a natural connection there, and it's one I intend to continue to pursue at least through graduate school, and quite probably beyond, thoughout my career.

Six months later

2006-07-06T01:25:00.000-04:00

The blogging impulse nags at me again.

I searched "Press Critic" on Google, and found myself on the first page with Jack Shafer, Jay Rosen, and Jim Romenesko. And searching for "The Wayward Press" puts me ahead of Liebling himself.

If the Google algorithm is going to reward me with such comparisons, I feel I need to do a better job with the blog. It's a duty, somehow.

Perhaps an update will be coming soon.

We interrupt this serial...

2005-12-21T23:17:00.000-05:00

...to bring you an important message from CJR Daily. I referred to the then-unpublished study "A Measure of Media Bias" in my 602 term paper, "Enterprising journalists: An empirical search for the source of bias in the media." In the paper, I am dismissive of it, as I am of all content analysis of journalism because it seems so entirely subjective. In fact, I have a hard time with all quantitative studies that try to take complex, subtle interactions and ideas and reduce them to numbers (see also the first paragraph of this post about Infromation Science research).

I think that in general, the worlds of academic media studies and journalism need to learn how the other works so that they can actually help each other. In this case, I side with CJR. So here, for your reading pleasure, and to save myself from having to write the rant: the CJR Daily article ripping into Groseclose and Milyo.

The idea of professionalism

2005-12-19T02:03:00.000-05:00

Note: This is part three of the serialization of my term papers. This section of "Journalism education, democracy, and the possibility of a more perfect professionalism" follows directly from this first post in the series.

--

Eliot Freidson (1994) dates the organization of professions to the post-industrial era, when work became less focused on the performance of tasks, and more on the acquisition and application of specialized knowledge (pp. 95–96). He defines a profession as an occupation so well organized that its members can realistically envisage a career over most of their working years, a career during which they retain a particular occupational identity and continue to practice the same skills no matter in what institution they work. A similar form of organization is to be found in the skilled trade or craft, though the craft cannot claim the same kind of knowledge-based skill as can the profession (p. 101).

Journalism certainly fits this idea of a profession, as opposed to a craft. Aside perhaps from academic researchers, what profession could be said to be more knowledge-based that journalism? While it is true that journalism’s knowledge base is not specialized nor even permanent, journalists must gather, digest and transmit huge amounts of knowledge in the course of their daily working lives. The work of journalists can be more clearly compared to that of researchers (though with a different intended audience) than to that of, say, woodworkers. Information, to coin a phrase, is not wood.

In an earlier book, Freidson (Freidson, 1986) suggested the relationship between professions and the power that they wield. “Professional groups, including scientists and academics, are often represented as the creators and proponents of particular bodies of knowledge that play important roles in shaping both social policy and the institutions of everyday life” (p. ix). This knowledge brings power and responsibility, and as the arbiters of general knowledge—as opposed to the specific knowledge of the professions Freidson mentions by name—this power and responsibility is amplified. Though he is perhaps the leading writer on professionalism (see also Abbott, 1988; Larson, 1977), Freidson does not mention journalists in either of his general books on the topic. Banning (1998) notes that “Discussion of the professionalization of journalism in the literature on professionalism is conspicuous by its absence” (p. 159).

Banning argues that professionalization is not a cluster of attributes, but rather a process, best expressed as a scale. This particular historical study does not even take a stance on whether or not journalism is a profession, but instead traces the changing attitudes of nineteenth and twentieth century journalists toward themselves.

In another examination specifically of journalism professionalism (Soloski, 1989), one researcher offers up a similar definition of professionalism that, on its face, actually seems less applicable to journalism:
For a profession to exist, it must secure control over the cognitive base of the profession. To do this a profession requires (1) that a body of esoteric and fairly stable knowledge about the professional task be mastered by all practitioners, and (2) that the public accepts the professionals as being the only individuals capable of delivering the professional services. (p. 210)

While there are some skills that a journalist needs that seem esoteric (use of editing and page-layout computer software, database manipulation, interviewing skills), the most clearly esoteric are the technical skills, and those are the most volatile. And as for point (2), journalism as a profession seems to have the highest propensity for an “I could do that” reaction from the general public. Laypeople don’t feel that way about surgeons or structural engineers, but many—if not most—people with solid general educations are capable of asking questions and turning the resulting information into a coherent story.

Enterprising journalists: An empirical search for the source of bias in the media

2005-12-18T00:54:00.000-05:00

Note: This is part 2 of a multi-part series of my term papers from the fall. In this installment, the abstract from my Research Foundations final project (This is unconnected to the previous post.):

Abstract

Observers and critics of American journalism argue about the nature of bias in newspapers, magazines, and television journalism. They agree, however, that bias of some kind is rampant. Accusations of bias in news reporting have risen at almost the same time as the ideal of objectivity has taken hold within the profession, coming to a head in the early 2000’s with a flurry of books by pundits, humorists, and serious critics from both sides of the ideological aisle. While the debate raged in the popular press, academic inquiry into the nature of bias in American journalism took three paths. Political economists of the media focus on the incentives for journalists to produce biased reporting—either to feed a desire for biased reporting, or to please corporate parents of media companies. Other scholars perform content analysis of journalism, trying to determine whether or not the news is actually as biased as partisan critics would have it. A third group looks at the effects of bias in the media on audiences, through the lens of audience studies.

This study takes a new approach, trying to determine whether or not the people who become journalists are prone to become opinion leaders because of their innate psychological makeup. Disregarding the contentious issue of defining political liberals and conservatives, this study adopts the theory of John L. Holland, a psychologist who developed a career interest inventory. In Holland’s theory, each person fits into three of his categories, and he predicts that journalists fit into the category he calls “enterprising.” Enterprisers are people who seek opportunities to persuade and influence. If journalists are, as Holland classifies them, “enterprisers,” then those who seek to limit bias in journalism may be fighting a losing battle.

Journalism education, democracy, and the possibility of a more perfect professionalism

2005-12-18T00:48:00.000-05:00

Introduction (Note: This is the first part of a multiple-part series that I am tentatively calling "My Fall 2005 term papers")

A.J. Liebling, the journalist, press critic and general bon vivant, attended the School of Journalism at Columbia University before starting his career. His assessment of his education was famously less than sanguine. He once wrote that “the program had ‘all the intellectual status of a training school for future employees of the A & P’” (qtd. in Remnick, 2004). His comment, while probably unduly harsh, represents an undeniable strain of anti-intellectualism in American journalism. (Liebling, of course, was complaining that Columbia’s journalism program was anti-intellectual, not that the practice of journalism should be.) Michael Lewis, in his scathing essay on journalism schools in The New Republic (Lewis, 1993), quoted one columnist who said, “All we do is ask questions and type and occasionally turn a phrase. Why do you need to go to school for that?” Nevertheless, journalism schools have continued to exist in more than one form for over a century—though the form that they should take is far from settled.

For about the same period, journalists have debated—both actively and passively—whether or not their line of work constitutes a profession (though the first stirrings of professionalism can be dated even earlier). Many prefer to see themselves as practitioners of a craft or a trade. Others believe that as collectors and disseminators of information for a mass audience, monitors of power, protectors of democracy, and an unofficial fourth branch of the government, they deserve the same professional prestige as lawyers, engineers, or architects. Journalists enjoy special protections in the United States, owing to their specific mention in the Bill of Rights; however, it is this special protection that may be preventing them from coalescing into a formal, coherent profession. Journalists cannot control entry into their own body because in the United States, anyone can be a journalist. Therefore, the professionalization of journalism must take place as a socialization process—a process in which journalism schools can play in instrumental part.

"NPR Activists and Classical Monks"

2005-11-30T03:10:00.000-05:00

Bailey, G. (2004). NPR activists and classical monks: Differentiating public radio formats. Journal of Radio Studies, 11(2), 184–193.

Theory and background: Bailey’s study was funded by a group of radio broadcasters who wanted to understand their audiences. Non-commercial radio stations in major markets have shifted away from their previous “crazy-quilt” programming to adopt a single format. In markets that supported a commercial classical music station, the public radio station usually abandoned music to concentrate on news. In other markets, two public stations would usually each take one of the classical or news formats. The stations wanted to know why, despite their similar demographics, there is little or no crossover between the audiences of classical music radio stations and National Public Radio news stations. Bailey discusses the “uses and gratifications” paradigm, which many researchers had abandoned because of methodological questions—namely that “uses” require quantitative data, and “gratifications” demand more exploratory research. Since surveys had already quantitatively established that there was little crossover between news and classical listeners, the researchers set up focus groups to explore gratifications.

Design: The research team identified four NPR stations, four noncommercial classical music stations, and two commercial classical stations that met strict criteria of broadcasting and audience service. The researchers deliberately chose disparate markets in several different American cities. The researchers aggregated their funding so that they could conduct 20 focus groups in their eight chosen markets, thus increasing their study’s external validity. Respondents were chosen for the focus groups by random interval samples from two sampling frames: a list of current and lapsed subscribers; and a telephone list of college graduates in target ZIP codes. This dual frame ensured that each focus group would involve both radio subscribers and non-subscribers. In the telephone screening, respondents were asked to describe their radio listening by unaided recall.

The 20 focus groups each consisted of 12 listeners. For the first 45 minutes of each session, the moderator asked what stations the respondents listened to and why. Bailey reports one particularly effective question that asked respondents how they would feel if a particular station were to go off the air. The remainder of each focus group session asked respondents to respond to brief samples of radio play from unfamiliar stations in order to get at “deeper, and more grounded expressions of how listener needs may or may not be fulfilled by radio programming” (p. 189).

Alternatives: In a world of infinite funding, the validity of the study might have been improved by conducting individual interviews with respondents, rather than focus groups, since social pressures might influence responses. A mailed survey could have reached a larger population, though that would not have allowed the researchers to play snippets of the radio programming to respondents, and would probably have resulted in less detailed responses, and given the stated qualitative nature of this study, a survey would have been less appropriate.

A Milestone

2005-11-30T01:58:00.000-05:00

I keep this Microsoft Word file on my desk called "everygradassignment.doc." I just pasted in that last reading summary, and I am quite proud to say that I just surpassed 10,000 words written for the semester in my two classes. I'm hoping that with 15- and 18-page term papers still to be written, I'll double that before Christmas.

Maybe "hoping" isn't quite the right word.

The end of the reading summaries

2005-11-30T01:49:00.000-05:00

Pettigrew, K. E., & McKechnie, L. E. F. (2001). The use of theory in information science research. Journal of The American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52(1), 62–73.

Shera, J. H. (1972). Communication, culture, and the library. In The foundations of education for librarianship (pp. 81–108). New York: Wiley.

Webber, S. (2003). Information science in 2003: a critique. Journal of Information Science, 29(4), 311–330.

I hope that I can admit without fear of reprisal that in my reading this semester, when a discipline makes the transition from those papers that make a grand call for a theory (whether in information science, communication processes or even my own field of media studies) to the actual research that is produced in support of those clarion calls, I am repeatedly rather disheartened. In preparation for the last class, we read Bush (1945), who may have been a little bit dreamy when he wrote of the Memex, and its potential to change the world. This week we read Pettigrew and McKechnie (2001), who, in their search to discover whether or not Information Science researchers refer to theories, code journal articles and reduce their findings to a number (34% of articles in IS, as it turns out, refer to theory). While this might be useful, it seems like an awful lot of work for a few percentages that could be reasonably guessed at by a reader well-versed in the literature. And it reminds me of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the meaning of life is also reduced to a single number. To my mind, it’s oversimplification. At any rate, in their study of 1160 articles, they found an average of less than one theory cited per article, and concluded that most of the theories originated in the social sciences (45.4%) or in IS itself (29.9%). Pettigrew & McKechnie write that “if fields such as information science (IS) are to delineate disciplinary boundaries… then they require their own theoretical bases” (p. 62). They seem to be saying that IS doesn’t count as a discipline without theory of its own.

Shera (1972) writes that “It is man’s capacity for organizing information into large and complex configurations, and his ability to transmit that information to other men, that is the great glory of the human species” (p. 84). In this way, he seems to be echoing Carey (1989), who quotes Dewey as saying that “of all things, communication is the most wonderful” (p. 13). Shera also agrees with Carey in advocating a cultural view of communication (though Shera applies this to Information Science and library studies where Carey uses it for media studies). In other words, they seem to be performing the same task for their respective disciplines: arguing that communication creates culture. Shera also discusses secondary communication, where a graphic record—writing or pictures—intervenes between the two people who are communicating. Shera then launches, appropriately, into a history of the library, which is the physical manifestation of the accrual of culture. (He quotes Alfred North Whitehead who gives credit to writing for the intellectual progress of mankind, and without citing him, invokes Brookes (1980), in arguing for Popper’s World III as the basis for IS research.) Shera writes that libraries began as elite private institutions and gradually became aggressively democratic institutions such as the public library with its drive to bring knowledge to the common man (p. 106). He argues, stirringly, that libraries can be instruments of social cohesion.

Webber (2003), however, finds less cohesion in the field of IS, as she sets out to determine the then-current status of the discipline. She concludes that, yes, IS is a discipline, though it is one of varied approaches and research problems. In embracing this diversity, she seems to side against those who would call IS “fragmentary.” She also dismisses writers such as Pettigrew & McKechnie who believe that a discipline needs a grand theory and focused research methods to be a discipline at all. She cites a growing body of research, and an international community of researchers as proof that it is a discipline. She outlines the idea of hard vs. soft and pure vs. applied, saying that Pettigrew & McKechnie are criticizing IS for not being a hard, pure science (one that uses empirical research to support explanatory theory). But Webber writes that IS is clearly an applied science, one in which the research is often directly applicable to practitioners, and one that includes both hard and soft elements in its research. Using this schema, she shows that the internecine debates of IS are not unique—and exist in many disciplines. As a British writer, she devotes the second half of her literature review to the state of Information Science in the UK.

Being somewhat skeptical of grand unifying theories and an over-emphasis on quantitative research, I tend to want to agree with Webber’s conclusion that the various “specialisms” that she identifies can all contribute to a more complicated vision of information science than a grand, unifying theory would seem to support.

But hey, that’s just me.

World I, World II, World War II, and World III

2005-11-16T08:31:00.000-05:00

Brookes, B. C. (1980). The foundations of information science. Part I. Philosophical aspects. Journal of Information Science, 2, 125–133.

Bush, V. (1945). As we may think [Electronic Version]. The Atlantic Monthly, 176, 101-108. Retrieved Nov. 10, 2005 from http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush.

Saracevic, T. (1999). Information science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(12), 1051–1063.

Vannevar Bush (1945) found himself, as an academic and a scientist (one who had been instrumental in the U.S. War effort), swamped by the amount of research that academic specialization had caused to be produced. The body of published work far outstripped the ability of a single scholar to access and assimilate it. He imagines some fanciful aids to research—a walnut-sized, forehead-mounted camera, for instance—but also called for the creation of something very much like the modern computer, attached to a searchable, hyperlinked Internet. “For mature thought,” Bush writes, “there is no mechanical substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things. For the latter, there are, and may be, powerful mechanical aids.” For processing observations and data, and adding them to the body of common knowledge, Bush proposes a machine he calls a “memex,” a desk in which a researcher’s books, records and communications would be stored and easily accessed via microfilm for the purpose of association—which is how Bush writes that the human mind works. The memex would create “associative trails” which could themselves be accessed, and even shared with colleagues. The present-day realization of Bush’s dream need not be elaborated upon (or even named, though I do above) for the connection to be clear.

Bush’s thought that the goal of research is to add to a common body of knowledge meshes well with Popper’s world of objective knowledge, as outlined in Brookes (1980). This is Popper’s “World III,” the first two being the physical world (World I) and the subjective worlds of individual human perception (World II). World III encompasses the sum of “human thought embodied in human artefacts, as in documents of course but also in music, the arts, the technologies” (Brookes 1980, p. 127). Brookes argues that this World III should be the basis for the theoretical and practical work of information science. The practical work would be the collection and organization of the knowledge in World III (he writes that librarians are have only worked with archiving the physical documents, not in assimilating and combining their content), and the theoretical work would be to study the interactions between World III and World II, the subjective world of perception. Brookes proposes his own hypothetical machine (though unlike Bush’s, his is a theoretical tool—a metaphor) called a “perceptron” (p. 132). Since it is a machine that can be tuned to pick up certain types of information, what it gathers can be called objective—though as soon as it is transmitted to a human researcher, it becomes subjective. This, to Brookes, is an ideal and a problem for further study. Brookes ends, quite inspiringly, actually, with a call to information scientists to recognize Popper’s World III as a basis for research. He points out that it is the only one created by humans, showing that there is something special about humans and returning us to some of the anthropocentric glory that Copernicus and Darwin (rightly) diminished.

Saracevic (1999) takes these philosophical foundations (those of Bush and Popper) and places them at the beginning of an outline of information science as a discipline. He points out the discipline’s three “powerful ideas”: information retrieval, relevance, and interaction; and he defines “information” in the broadest sense: cognitively processed messages that appear in a relational context (p. 1054). Saracevic writes that information science divides into two clusters: the domain cluster, which includes information analysts of various sorts, and the retrieval cluster, which is mainly interested in applied usages. Within the information retrieval (IR) cluster, there is a paradigm split between those who study systems exclusively and those who acknowledge a human user of the IR systems. Saracevic argues that the important problem here is to find a theory that can encompass both ends of the spectrum. Educational and professional divisions follow similar philosophical lines. On the topic of relevance, the important problem is finding a way to make systems relevance (responses to queries) more compatible with other types of relevance (what users actually search for). Saracevic ends with this as the most important topic for further research in the discipline.

I find it quite instructive to read these essays in chronological order and to watch a discipline move from dreamy theorizing to practical solutions to real problems. I’m personally more attracted to the theory in information science, and I can find great personal utility in Popper’s three worlds, especially in one of my research interests, which is the process of canonization of written works—how a book or an article becomes a “classic.” I also like the idea, which Brookes mentions in passing, that a small change in information can lead to a huge change in understanding. It’s an idea like that that makes the incremental work of scholarly research worthwhile—and tolerable.

What, are you Mad?

2005-11-04T19:51:00.000-05:00

McChesney, R. (2000). So much for the magic of technology and the free market: the World Wide Web and the corporate media system. In A. Herman & T. Swiss (Eds.), The World Wide Web and contemporary cultural theory (pp. 5–35). New York: Routledge.

Norris, V. P. (1984). Mad economics: an analysis of an adless magazine. Journal of communication, 34(1), 44-61.

Schiller, D., & Mosco, V. (2001). Introduction: integrating a continent for a transnational world. In V. Mosco & D. Schiller (Eds.), Continental order? Integrating North America for cybercapitalism (pp. 1–34). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Despite having aced my high school AP macroeconomics course, I’ve come late to an appreciation of economics and its worldview. In this week’s readings, I’ve started to see the utility of political economy in looking at media, but I’m personally more impressed with it on the micro level than at the macro. Schiller and Mosco (2001) take a very macro view, examining the longitudinal liberalization of trade regulation that has allowed telecommunication and media corporations to conglomerate and spend their capital on foreign direct investment and become transnational corporations, mostly—as this is the focus of their book—in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. I find the fact that the cultural exceptions were the last restrictions to go quite interesting, and maybe a topic for further study. And I find the general trend toward ever-larger communications conglomerates troubling. But in general, I see this essay mostly as background.

I’m more interested in McChesney (2000), who economically analyzes the claim that the Internet “will set us free” (p. 5). He demonstrates that free markets tend not to result in free competition, but in oligopolies of large corporations (p. 9). Small companies do have influence in the market, spending money on risky research and development programs, but they then tend to be purchased by larger, established companies if they are successful. McChesney writes that large media companies will continue to dominate even on the Web. These large companies have deep pockets and are therefore willing to wait out smaller companies who will determine what applications of the technology will make money. They can also advertise themselves on their existing media networks; transfer their content online with little added cost; and reap the benefits of advertising. I think McChesney is probably right in his overall thesis, that large corporations will continue to dominate online, but I think he might be too gloomy about journalism in particular. A.J. Liebling said that “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” which has always previously been true: the barrier to entry was much too high for most independent journalism. But even if media giants do dominate the Web, its now almost-zero barrier seems to allow even one-man operations to be able to exist and for networks like blogs to be able to promote them adequately. I disagree that, as McChesney says dismissively, “journalism is not something that can be undertaken piecemeal by amateurs working in their spare time” (p. 29). Who says? Maybe it’s better done by those with training and institutional support, but for the same reason that there is no licensing for journalists in this country, it is almost impossible to limit who is a journalist, and while corporate monsters may dominate, and small media companies may die out or be bought, non-corporate, non-profit journalists can find an audience for the first time. I think a purely economic analysis leaves these independent voices out.

Norris (1984) takes the most microeconomic approach to media, and to me was the most interesting—and because of his specific topic, the most fun. He analyzes the financial data of Mad magazine to see whether—and why—a magazine with no ads could be profitable, which flies in the face of the magazine world’s received wisdom. Magazines have high fixed costs, such as rent for office space and employee salaries (though they generally have small editorial staffs) and variable costs that mostly come from the cost of printing, meaning that their marginal costs (the price of printing one more issue) are low. Because old magazines hardly sell, the publisher assumes the risk of printing costs, paying for all unsold copies (and explaining why many magazines are post-dated by a month or two). Mad’s publisher prints 1.9 million copies of the magazine, and sells about half of them, though there is no way to know in advance which half will be bought. The cover price and the circulation determine whether or not the magazine makes a profit, since the printing costs are relatively unchanged. Interestingly, adding advertisements may increase the fixed costs of publishing a magazine substantially, since that would require adding a sales staff and their overhead, which might not be outweighed by advertising income. Since magazine demand is generally inelastic, the same qualities that make a magazine appealing to advertisers would also allow the publisher to charge a higher cover price without losing circulation (p. 60). Despite this convincing argument, I can’t imagine that a single magazine has canned its ad department in the 20 years since Norris’s essay was published. Maybe this is because ads lend legitimacy to a magazine, somehow separating them from journals or newsletters. In many cases, I imagine that this is because ads are a large part of the appeal of certain magazines—fashion, car, and technology magazines come to mind. I like the pragmatism of this application of economics, and could see using this approach in my own work, though I also see utility in McChesney, and can at least appreciate Schiller and Mosco.

Carey Me Home

2005-11-02T23:09:00.000-05:00

Carey, J. W. (1989). A cultural approach to communication. In Communication as culture: Essays on media and society (pp. 13–36). New York: Routledge.

Gitlin, T. (1978). Media sociology: The dominant paradigm. Theory and society, 6. 205–253.

Hall, S. (1992). Encoding/decoding. In Culture, media, language (pp. 128–138). London: Hutchinson.

Hall (1992), in what seems to me to be unnecessarily dense prose, outlines a semiotic model of mass communications in which a message is encoded into a symbolic system of some kind—words, images, words and images—and then decoded again by an audience. Both ends of this process are framed by various cultural influences: “frameworks of knowledge,” “relations of production,” and “technical infrastructure” (p. 130). Hall intends this model to replace the behaviorist model that he (among others) believes has overwhelmed mass communications research. He proposes three positions from which a transmitted, encoded message can be decoded: “dominant-hegemonic,” in which the audience receives exactly the message the encoder intended; “negotiated code,” in which the audience takes the message with qualifications, adaptations and objections; and “oppositional code,” in which the audience rejects the message entirely (pp. 136–138).

Gitlin (1978) is also quite concerned with picking apart what he has identified as the dominant paradigm of mass communications research, Lazarsfeld’s “personal influence” model and the behavioral studies of media’s effects. Gitlin particularly discusses the “two-step flow of communications” theory that “opinion leaders” influence the general population, instead of the mass media doing so directly. Gitlin argues that this improperly diminishes the influence of the media, and that measuring short-term opinion change is an inadequate way to measure the influence of the media. Gitlin roots his argument in an historical analysis of Lazarsfeld’s “administrative” approach to social science, and his relationships with the sources of his funds—particularly the Rockefeller Foundation, CBS, and a publisher named Mcfadden who sponsored a particular study of Lazarsfeld’s and may have (Gitlin argues this case) influenced the choice of variables and subjects (p. 236). Gitlin does not offer a particular new paradigm to replace this other so much as call for one. Media sociology, Gitlin writes, “could work, in other words, to show a dynamic but determinate media process articulated with the whole of political culture” (p. 239). And in a footnote, he refers to “the alternative approach of cultural studies, influenced by Marxist cultural theory and semiological “readings” of content” which he calls “the most promising angle of analysis” (p. 246). The semiological analysis leads directly back to Hall (1992), and also segues well into Carey (1989).

I took a class with James Carey at Columbia, and as a journalism student, I had a vague idea that he was a bigshot, but his class, “Critical Issues in Journalism,” which he co-taught with a journalist, was not particularly heavy on theory. Still, it was the highlight of my Fall, since it was the one of only a couple of classes I had that dealt with ideas. Now as I make a career shift from journalism to media studies, he’s become a hero to me. I found myself boxing in passages and littering the margins with asterisks—my sign to myself that I am excited by ideas. I particularly enjoy Carey’s insight that “communication is not some pure phenomenon we can discover; there is no such thing as communication to be revealed in nature through some objective method free from the corruption of culture” (p. 31). To Carey, culture is a human construction, and communication is the constant production and reproduction of that culture. This is the “ritual” view of communication, one more closely linked to “community” than to the transmission of messages. In this view, the ritual of reading a newspaper helps to construct or reinforce a view of the world more than it transmits information (though he allows that a newspaper can do that as well). Carey works well with Hall in that both endorse the semiotic view of communication as constructed symbols, though Hall seems to be using the “transmission model” that Carey mostly rejects as stultifying. What excites me so much about Carey is that he acknowledges that acts of communication are rooted in historical time, and that he is willing to mine the disciplines of “biology, theology, anthropology, and literature” for ways of looking at communication (p. 23).

Future Employees of the A&P

2005-11-02T02:43:00.000-05:00

1. Journalism education gets a bad rap from both sides. Universities find journalism schools anti-intellectual, more akin to business schools than to law schools, but without the rich alumni to justify promoting them on campus. And the profession doesn’t have much use for formal education in journalism either. The New Yorker writer and Columbia University journalism graduate A.J. Liebling said it most famously when he wrote that “the program had ‘all the intellectual status of a training school for future employees of the A & P’” (Remnick, 2004). Because of these perceptions, a methodical study of perceptions of journalism education is needed. Since a study of the quality of a journalism education is outside the realm of this exercise, it is useful to focus instead on perceptions of the value of journalism education. And to study this, this exercise looks at a group of people who have the ability to assign a monetary value to it: prospective employers of journalists. Operationally, this group would be editors who hire and manage journalists at magazines, newspapers, and online publications. This exercise works with the following research question: How does a journalist’s education affect his desirability to prospective employers?

2. To explore the possible answers to this question, I propose the following two hypotheses, and their corresponding null hypotheses:
H1: There is a relationship between having a degree from a journalism school and level of success in a journalism career.
H0: There is no relationship between having a degree from a journalism school and level of success in a journalism career.
H2: Editors show a clear preference for hiring journalists with journalism degrees over those without journalism degrees.
H0: Editors show no clear preference for hiring journalists with journalism degrees over those without journalism degrees.
H1 tests for a simple relationship between the variables of having a journalism school degree and success in a journalism career. This is a weaker, two-tailed hypothesis. H2 looks for a directional relationship between having a journalism degree and likelihood of being hired. Though easier to reject, this is a stronger, one-tailed hypothesis.

3. Since having a journalism degree or not is a simple dichotomous measure, I will operationally define a “level of success in a journalism career,” as referred to in H1. Level of success in a journalism career can be defined as the percentage of change in a participant’s salary over the most recent continuous ten years of the participant’s employment. Since journalism careers are often volatile (and changing jobs can even be a sign of success, not failure), “continuous employment” does not necessarily mean that the participant was employed at the same publication for all ten years. The percentage change in salary represents the assumption that the journalist’s career is advancing. Freelance journalists will not be included, since, in effect, they hire themselves, and their possession of a journalism degree would not have to impress anyone to gain employment. An alternative measure of success, honors and awards received for journalistic work, was rejected because too few awards exist to measure meaningfully. Another alternative, employer satisfaction with the journalist’s work, was rejected under the assumption that higher employer satisfaction would also result in higher salaries for the journalist, which is the measure under consideration.

4. A second variable in this exercise, taken from H2, can be defined in several different ways. That variable is “editors’ preference for hiring journalists with journalism school degrees,” and can be defined as follows:

a. Dichotomous measure: editors can be asked whether or not they have ever hired a journalist who holds a journalism school degree. Answers will fall into two categories: yes, they have; or no, they have not.

b. Nominal measure: applicants for journalism jobs can be classified into (at least) four categories:
1. Journalism school graduates with a bachelor’s degree
2. Journalism school graduates with a master’s degree
3. Liberal arts graduates with a bachelor’s degree
4. Liberal arts graduates with a master’s degree

c. To establish an ordinal measure, editors can be asked to respond to the following prompt: Rank the following attributes of journalism job applicants in order (highest to lowest) of desirability:
• A journalism degree
• A liberal arts degree
• Professional experience as a journalist
• Other professional experience
• Publication history
• A journalism internship
• Writing ability as shown in published stories
• Writing ability as shown on an employer-proctored writing test

d. The ordinal measure proposed in part c. could easily be adapted to serve as a Likert-type scale. The prompt could be rephrased to read: “Rate the importance of each of the following attributes of a prospective employee on a scale of 1–7, with 1 equaling ‘not important at all,’ and 7 equaling ‘extremely important.’” Then, each of the above attributes would be listed with a Likert scale matching the prompt underneath it.
e. In order to measure the concept of editors’ perceptions of journalism degrees as valuable when hiring journalists as a ratio measure, a researcher could simply ask how many employees the editor has who hold journalism degrees. Since having four employees with journalism degrees means that an organization has twice as many such employees as an organization with only two, this is a natural ratio measure. In order to facilitate comparison of news organizations of different sizes, the researcher could express the number as a percentage of the total number of employees.
In researching H2, these five operational definitions have varying degrees of utility. The dichotomous measure, for instance, would not be of much value in finding results. If anything, it could be used to disqualify one category of editors from participation in the study if that were desired. However, the “no” category might be interesting to include in the study, and it is also covered in definition e., the ratio measure. Similarly, the nominal measure could be used to sort respondents into categories for study with one of the other measures, but is not very useful on its own. The ordinal measure in definition c. and the Likert scale in definition d. are quite similar in that they ask about the importance of various attributes to editors when they are hiring. The Likert scale would be preferable though, since the ordinal data collected in c. would also appear in d., and Likert scales have the advantage of being able to be analyzed as ratio data as argued by Labovitz (Labovitz, 1971).

5. One potential threat to the validity of H2 would result from a sampling bias. For example, if the study were to survey only editors who were themselves graduates of journalism schools, the generalizability of the results to the entire universe of editors would be reduced. While the internal validity of the study would be increased by such a limitation, there are threats to the external validity (Krathwohl, 1998). If journalism school graduate editors disproportionately favor journalism school graduates (which certainly has face validity) in comparison to other editors, the relationship of the variables would be shown to hold, even if it did were not true across the entire population of editors in the real world. This would be a Type I error. Random assignments of respondents from a sampling frame—in this case a list of editors—would reduce the effects of this sampling bias (Sudman, 1983).

These hypotheses could also be affected by a local history threat to validity. For example, if a chain of newspapers employing a number of respondents in the study were to suffer systemic financial problems and institute a wage freeze for several years, the percentage change in journalists’ salaries for those years would be zero, thus invalidating the operational definition of “success” for those journalists. The hypothesis would appear to be rejected, even though the real-world principle might still hold. This would be a Type II error. To preserve validity, those cases could be eliminated, but that might significantly reduce the sample size, thus threatening validity in other ways (Krathwohl, 1998, pp. 515, 527).

References
Krathwohl, D. R. (1998). Methods of educational and social science research: an integrated approach (Second ed.). Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press.
Labovitz, S. (1971). The assignment of numbers to rank order categories. American Sociological Review, 35, 515–525.
Remnick, D. (2004). Introduction: reporting it all. In Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer (pp. ix–xxvi). New York: North Point Press.
Sudman, S. (1983). Chapter 5: Applied sampling. In P. H. Rossi, J. D. Wright & A. B. Anderson (Eds.), Handbook of survey research. Orlando: Academic Press, Inc.

In Theory

2005-10-25T22:55:00.000-04:00

Bateson, G. (1996). Communication. In H. B. Mokros (Ed.), Interaction and identity: Information and Behavior (Vol. 5, pp. 45–70). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Craig, R. T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication theory, 9(2), 119–161.

Deetz, S. A. (1994). Future of the discipline: The challenges, the research, and the social contribution. In S. A. Deetz (Ed.), Communications yearbook 17. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

I began my reading this week with Craig (1999), which may have been a mistake in terms of absorbing concepts. Craig believes that communication theory can and should become a unified field of study through the use of a “constitutive metamodel,” and that the existing multidisciplinary traditions can be seen within this frame as seven different “vocabularies” (pp. 120–121). He argues that a dialogical/dialectical model, in which the various traditions are aware of how they complement each other and how they disagree, can unite the various disciplines contained within the field. I had trouble coming to a working definition of “constitutive” (in the context of communication) as I read, but because of the seven approaches to theory that Craig outlines, I came to think of “constitutive” as meaning “comprised by” in that the seven traditions make up communications theory as Craig sees it. I’m fairly sure now that this isn’t how Craig intended “constitutive” to be read, but I do think it’s still a fair way to look at his essay.

Deetz (1994) agrees with Craig that communication studies is in need of a clearer theoretical basis, and it is from Deetz that I take a definition of “constitutive” that makes me comfortable: “From a constitutive conception, all expression is derived from a more fundamental set of discursive practices in which the things that are to be expressed by messages are constitutively produced through messages” (p. 573). Deetz presents this constitutive communication view of the world as being in opposition to an information view, in which messages are transmitted whole rather than being constructed between participants in the communication. He calls this theoretical view of the world a discipline3, “a relatively organized way of attending to the world that explains how things came to be as they are” (p. 567). (He defines a discipline1 as an academic department and a discipline2 as a “field of study,” which is where he believes communication studies was when he wrote (p. 567)). Deetz advocates a pragmatic, political approach to communication studies, with active participation (a communication model) preferable to manufactured consent (transmission). Slightly off the main thesis of this paper, but also interesting to me as a media scholar, Deetz also contends that “Objectivity was oversold for the sake of prestige for clusters of elite researchers, journalists, teachers, and owners of knowledge” (p. 587).

Bateson (1996) appears to be the discussion of theory that accompanies a multidisciplinary study called The natural history of an interview. This, I discovered through research, was an unpublished 1971 book, and the context helps explain the content of the essay—and my discovery of context fits in well, actually, with Bateson’s discussion of context as informing a method of inquiry (pp. 55–56): I was able to look at Bateson’s article from a higher level of Gestalt. Predating both of the above theorists, Bateson relies on the theories of communication that most directly impinge on the study at hand. He comments on Freudian ideas of the unconscious and the Gestalt idea of punctuated experience. The discussion that he subheads “Interaction” reads strikingly like a version of Deetz’s (1994) constitutive theory of communication. He also compares orders of communication to orders of learning, and points out something that seems to be a constant issue for communication studies: “that we deal with entities whose behavior is by no means describable in terms of linear equations and monotone logic” (p. 67).

Somewhere in the middle of the Deetz (1994) article, I became annoyed with the entire premise for what he—and also Craig (1999)—were attempting. I like both of their overarching, unifying communication theories, but I feel like the motives for creating them in the first place are reactionary. As Deetz writes, communication departments earn little respect on campuses, and communication textbooks are not good (p. 565). But a large part of me feels like these theorists are theorizing merely because they want to justify the fact that the various disciplines of communication have found themselves lumped together for the reasons outlined by Delia (1987) and Peters (1999) in last week’s readings. Craig (1999) calls this state of things at its best “productive fragmentation” (p. 122). And I like his unifying theory better since it retains many of the various disciplinary approaches as separate but communicating entities within the new discipline. Still though, I feel as if other disciplines had the theories before they had the academic departments, and I wonder if that makes those the stronger disciplines, at least theoretically. Or maybe, as Deetz writes (echoing, it would seem, a common assertion), communication studies is still in its adolescence. I’m still unsettled about the usefulness of these unifying theories.

From ontology to pragmatism

2005-09-28T08:50:00.000-04:00

I apologize if posting nothing but weekly reading responses to academic articles in the communication field gets boring, but it's a direct result of my not really having much time to do other things. This week, we move on to the history of the field of communication, which developed as its own field mostly after WWII. For some reason, I struggled with writing this one more than I did the first two. Maybe that comes from trying to summarize and analyze 100 pages of dense history in less than three pages.

Delia, J.G. (1987). Communication research: A history. In C. Berger & S. Chafee (Eds.), Handbook of communication science (pp. 20–98). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Peters, J. D. (1999). Introduction: The problem of communication. In Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication (pp. 1–31). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Delia (1987) and Peters (1999) both, nominally, have the history of communication (and I intentionally use Peters’s singular formulation of the word) as their subject, but their titles alone hint at their differences in approach. Delia looks at the history of communication as a field of academic research, seemingly slogging out from the trenches of the various fields out of which he contemporary communication research has grown—sociology, social psychology, political science, and even literature (p.26)—and tracing how the various disciplinary concerns of these approaches to a similar subject of research led to the creation of a new, and in his view poorly-defined discipline of communication research which still struggles to define what constitutes its boundaries. Peters swoops in from a much more ontological perch—trying to come to a definition of his own and struggling with the concept of communication before narrowing in to discuss the development of its various constituent and precursor disciplines.

Delia’s earth-bound, pragmatist, approach has helped me come to terms with the definitional boundaries of the field of communication. I had always been a bit bewildered at how many seemingly different approaches various institutions take to what they each call communication. As an undergraduate, I was in proximity to the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School, which skews toward the study of political communications. There are schools that seem to equate communications with semiotics. Some are practically schools of journalism. Delia argues that communication as a discipline arose out of the confluence of the rise of mass communication technologies in the 20th Century, the work of philosophers such as Dewey, propaganda theorists and public opinion analysts such as Lippmann, and the Chicago school of sociological research, which emphasized scientific methods. Delia cites Lazarsfeld as a crucial player in uniting the various strands of communication research in the 1940s (p. 53).

In the post WWII-period, the term “communications” first appeared as a subject of research, and through the 1950s and ’60s, the social science approach to communication pushed humanistic and qualitative approaches out of the mainstream. Delia argues that the incorporation of communications research into journalism schools and speech programs further separated mass communication research from interpersonal communications in the academy. He also believes that this has been limiting since journalism and speech, while intimately connected to communications research, are not where the study came from originally (p. 86). At any rate, it explains my perception of the fragmentation of schools of “communication,” but also continues (perhaps in a beneficial way) my perplexity at the boundaries between communications and media studies. It also links well with the interdisciplinarity of information science described in Rayward (1996) It is also interesting to note that Delia attributes journalism schools’ eagerness to absorb communications studies to the desire for more academic seriousness in these schools that often still command less respect than other more explicitly research-based disciplines.

Though Peters (1999) is willing to discuss communications as far back as cavemen, he only pins the beginnings a few years earlier than Delia does. He also agrees with Delia that the term suffers from confusion, though consistent with his own approach, he defines it as “conceptual confusion” rather than Delia’s disciplinary mixing: “’communication’ in much contemporary discourse exists as a sort of ill formed, undifferentiated conceptual germ plasm,” Peters writes (p. 6). Peters’s account of the history of communication studies takes in more theorists and philosophers than social scientists. Lippmann is here as in Delia, but so is Wittgenstein, so is Heidegger, so is Dewey—and so are Kafka, Beckett and Eliot. Peters is less concerned with approaches to a field than with “visions” of communication. He does however agree that the visions and the academic incarnations of those visions are fragmented, and in his view the best way to tackle the study of communications is to find a path somewhere between what he calls “the dream of communication” and a more pragmatic approach that admits that despite the failings of communication, people must find a way to go on with their business.

Weekly reading summary #2

2005-09-23T17:24:00.000-04:00

D’Andrade, R. (1986). Three scientific world views and the covering law model. In D.W. Fiske & R.A. Shweder (Eds.), Metatheory in social science: Pluralisms and subjectivities (pp. 19–41). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rayward, W. B. (1996). The history and historiography of information science: Some reflections. Information Processing & Management, 32(1), 3–17.

Said, E. (1993). The politics of knowledge. In C. McCarthy & W. Crichlow (Eds.), Race, identity and representation in education (pp. 306–314). New York: Routledge.

D’Andrade (1986) presents the covering law model of science, which states that science consists of the search for laws, generalized across a series of events, that explain and predict the chain of events. (pp. 19–20) He argues that this model applies well to physical sciences, less well to natural sciences, and more problematically to “semiotic” sciences. He writes that these are three separate worldviews and that the social sciences, which fit into the category of semiotic sciences, need not feel constrained by the covering law model. The semiotic sciences explore the creation of an imposed order rather than explaining a natural order. They require a creative, interpretive path to discovery of this order. (p. 23) Critics point out the intersubjectivity of social science—the degree to which one even can have different meanings for different people—and some directly reject any science that deals with interpretation of meanings. (p. 31) D’Andrade contends that narrowing the range of possible interpretations through data collection can strengthen research. (p. 33)

Rayward (1996) writes that Information Science’s diffuse and undefined nature poses problems for its historians, and that the field’s interdisciplinarity is a dominant theme. (pp. 3–5) He spends much of his essay explaining the divide between Library and Information Science and Computer and Information Science, but eventually concludes that since so much current (in 1996) research in the former led to the latter, the differences no longer matter, if they ever did. Therefore historians of Information Science can appropriate any discipline they feel is necessary to tell the stories of the field. Information Science, as it is currently understood, appeared with the advent of new information processing machines after World War II. Because of this brief history, most academic treatment of Information Science fits into Braudel’s idea of the durée courte, or short-term history. (pp. 12–13) Rayward suggests two approaches to studying this history: synchronic, which focuses on the various academic endeavors of a single period; and diachronic, which studies a single issue, method, or approach over more than one time period, as defined by the individual researcher. (pp. 13–14)

In Said’s essay (1993), he argues that a politics based strictly upon racial or nationalist identity is insufficient for a post-imperialist, postcolonial world. The original movements of cultural and minority identity activism were meant to include works by previously ignored or undervalued writers and thinkers in the canon, rather than elevating them to a place of honor above the canon. For aiding his thinking, Said credits Frantz Fanon, who warned against “the hijacking of common sense by bureaucrats, technical experts and jargon-wielding obfuscators” (p. 309). This directly echoes (or rather, foreshadows, in real time) last week’s essay by McMurtry. Said specificially describes an incident in which he was excoriated for not including non-European thinkers in a chapter about European intellectual history. Said writes that some circumstances certainly warrant the inclusion of such writers but that simply including a list of their names would undervalue their contributions. I encountered a similar situation when writing a proposal for a new course. The one black member of the department’s curriculum committee demanded that I add “some black names” to the list of required readings, even though the field’s introductory classics have been dominated by white writers.

Despite having no previous academic interest in library and information science, I find myself very much drawn to the interdisciplinarity of it, since my field, media studies, is similarly poorly defined. Rayward’s definition of Information Science as an “interdiscipline” would work well in helping me to define my own field. Since I am interested in the history of the media—and of attempts to understand it—I could directly appropriate Rayward’s discussion of the synchronic and the diachronic for my own work. Even aside from history however, I am heartened by the concept of an “interdiscipline” since my own interests in media studies encompass the fields of sociology, education, history, literature and cultural studies—which has often made it difficult to define myself.

I am also encouraged by D’Andrade’s three-world-view model, since the first two weeks of my readings in the Ph.D. program have focused heavily on the social science experimentation mode of research, which is not how I envisioned the bulk of my own work before matriculating. I have already taken in much of the value of this evidentiary approach, but have been struggling with its limitations, and hoping for a validation of other methods, which I find here.

Said’s essay itself exemplifies both the interdisciplinary and interpretive approaches that I hope to incorporate into my own work, in that Said’s historical, cultural, and literary knowledge all combine to make a powerful argument about society’s intellectual constructs. It is interdisciplinary, echoing Rayward’s description of Information Science. It is also interpretive, rather than trying to demonstrate some sort of general law. It is an argument firmly rooted in time, place, and Said’s own political views, but it is no less strong for that. In fact, had Said not attended the academic conference that launched his line of thinking, his essay might not exist at all.

Weekly reading summary #1

2005-09-23T17:20:00.000-04:00

I would imagine that the following will be of limited interest, but I want to post my weekly reading summaries from my introductory class. If you feel like reading such things then please do, by all means. Mostly I'm putting them up to give myself easy reference to them in the future. Like all else on this blog, the copyright on the following commentaries belongs to me. Plagiarists should die.

Buckland, M. (1991). Chapters 1, 4, 5 & 6. In Information and information systems. New York: Praeger.

McMurtry, J. (2002). Preface. In Value wars: The global market versus the life economy. (pp. xii–xxv). Sterling, VA: Pluto Press.

Sapir, E. (1949). Communication. In D.G. Mandelbaum (Ed.), Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality, (pp. 104–109). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Buckland (1991) essays a definition of “information” as both a practical exercise (for the construction of information storage and retrieval systems) and as an epistemological exploration. He defines “information-as-process” as “the act of becoming informed”; “information-as-knowledge” as “that which is imparted when one becomes informed, and “information-as-thing” as physical representations of information that—while they are not themselves knowledge—impart information, however imperfectly. (p. 43) Knowledge, Buckland argues, is dependent on belief. (p. 40)

McMurtry (2002) asserts that an “unseen moral syntax” (p. xiv) controls what information will be perceived as true. Using the failure of investigative organizations (including media, which he writes are “dominantly owned by military-industrial and infotainment corporations” (p. xii)) to report the international power structure’s complicity in the attacks of September 11, 2001, McMurtry shows how a deeply ingrained value structure contributes to the “inertial acquiescence of the occupied mass mind” (p. xiv).

Sapir (1949), in delineating the various types of communication from interpersonal communication to mass media, and from language to gesture to “social suggestion” (p. 106) argues that these types of communication are linked to the construction of society, which is not a fixed construct, but one that is constantly in flux. In particular he concludes (in a prescient essay originally written in 1931) that evolving communication technologies would force an increasingly smaller global society to overcome its biggest communication obstacle: language translation. He predicts “that the civilized world will adopt one language of intercommunication, say English or Esperanto, which can be set aside for denotive purposes pure and simple. (p. 109)

For my own interests in journalism and media studies, I connect parts of all three of these studies to form a sort of nascent theory of the ultimate goals of the journalistic process. From Buckland (1991) I take the idea that knowledge is dependent on belief, which relates to studies showing that readers’ trust in newsgathering organizations has fallen precipitously low. Regardless of the accuracy of a given news report (Buckland dismisses accuracy as a qualification for information), the public will be disinclined to accept information from that news report if they do not first believe in that information. Of course, Buckland also raises some problems inherent in any physical representation of information: it is liable to be misinterpreted by its consumer, and will be filtered through both human interpretation and the limitations of language by its author. (p. 53) The optimist in me would hope that a news consumer would accept these limitations and therefore, at least provisionally, accept a news report from a reliable source (and I don’t have a method yet for determining what is “reliable”—perhaps that is left up to the relationship between the individual news consumer and the news organization).

The cynic in me however, is liable to turn to McMurtry (2002) for a reason—as a news consumer myself—to distrust these organizations. McMurtry’s argument that an ingrained value structure dictates the ability of certain facts to penetrate the mass mind clearly links to Buckland’s assertion that knowledge depends on belief. If this moral framework is as pervasive and insidious as McMurtry makes it out to be, then that belief system will not allow the mass audience to become informed in Buckland’s definition, since becoming informed relies on “a change in our beliefs” (p. 40)

This pervasiveness, of course, is largely possible because of the globalization of communication that Sapir (1963) predicts. The propaganda that McMurtry reviles has swamped the global communication network that Sapir predicts, overwhelming the construction of a global society, as Sapir defines society. Luckily for adherents to McMurtry’s argument (and though I’m swayed, I’m not yet convinced), Sapir does write that society is a process, and McMurtry’s proposed solution remains achievable: “Once the human project is released from their invisible prison of presupposition, the constitutional resources to steer out of the accumulating breakdown of life conditions become decisively evident” (p. xxv).

As for the ultimate goal of journalism, it could be seen as to inform, in Buckland’s definition, in order to avoid the sort of mass misinformation evident in McMurtry’s essay in order to build Sapir’s conception of society.

The Slightly Less Gray Lady

2005-09-22T14:21:00.000-04:00

I make my students read the New York Times, and many of them think it's boring. My knee-jerk reaction, as a journalism professor, is to defend it. And while I still do think the Times is probably the best newspaper in the country, I've also come to agree with my students. The Times is boring.

But it got slightly less boring last Sunday with the publication in the Times Magazine of a brilliantly conceived yet poorly executed new section that the editors have dubbed "The Funny Pages." The Funny Pages are divided into three promising sections:

I. The Strip. The first edition of The Strip is an architectural comic of some sort by Chris Ware. I admire Chris Ware quite a bit, and have assigned his graphic novel, 'Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth' to my students. His drawings are spectacular and his stories are touching. They're not particularly funny though. The first episode involves the interior monologue of a townhouse. Don't know where this is going, but I'm intrigued enough to keep reading even though it's neither a strip nor funny.

II. True-Life Tales. The editors say that these will be comic short essays in the mold of James Thurber or David Sedaris, both of whose feet I'm not good enough to kiss. Comic short essays are an underappreciated form, and a regular outlet for them would be great. This first one, by Elizabeth Gilbert and about yoga in the South is OK. I didn't laugh out loud, but these are hit-or-miss. I'll forgive. Especially since I see these as an antidote to the maudlin "Lives" column that is always on the last page of the Times Magazine. I describe the "Lives" personal essays to my students as "The Day I Found Out I had Cancer was the Day my Cat Died."

III. Sunday Serial. The third part of The Funny Pages is the second that's not even intended to be funny (then why the name?). It's a serialized short novel by Elmore Leonard, who writes comic crime novels. This one is some sort of World War II-era mystery story that so far has a German soldier killing himself in a POW camp in Oklahoma. Where it goes from there I don't know. I'm not hooked yet, but I got my friend Jason to hold a newspaper for three minutes and read it (though I've had success in handing him the crossword, too). And that's enough of an accomplishment for me.

I'll keep watching this to see where it goes. I just wish it had a bolder graphic identity. There's an article on Slate right now about the bold graphics of the old New York World, Joseph Pulitzer's paper. Take the talents behind the Funny Papers and let them loose on a broadsheet, and maybe we'll have something interesting. For now though, this is a not-so-terrible start.

I've Got Class

2005-09-15T14:31:00.000-04:00

One of the many hats I wear is a professor of journalism at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, New York. I have created a blog that will link to my students' blogs. You can find it by going to JournalScope.

Reporters are as lazy as anyone else

2005-08-29T21:08:00.000-04:00

First, an epigraph:

"As long as we're knocking down myths, let's take a swing at the myth of the reporter who, if his mother says she loves him, checks it out by 1) getting an affidavit from the old lady attesting to the fact; 2) finding an independent source to verify the alleged love bond; and 3) unearthing material evidence of her devotion for her offspring. The reality is that too many reporters just want to go home and will phone anybody who will give them a good quotation to tie up all those loose ends."

--Jack Schafer, in a Slate article that's mostly about bad crystal meth reporting

------------------

And now, as response and comment, I quote myself, from my unfinished memoir of journalism school, which I was calling "J." I want to distance myself from it a bit. It's been a long time since I wrote this, and I'm not sure that I agree with everything I say in it. So from here on out, it's all quote:

------------------

I was talking with a friend of mine one night at the wonderfully named Nussbaum & Wu bakery. We were killing an hour or so between our magazine workshop and a required lecture series for magazine concentrators. It was getting within a month or so of our graduation from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s master’s program, and we were talking jobs. Jobs being an important subject to people about to make the sudden and drastic social change from “student” to “unemployed.”

I was talking, as I had been quite often around that time, about how I was perfectly willing to sell out. To find a job that would make me equally as miserable as journalism, and yet would pay me. Anything. I had, in fact, received an email not an hour before this talk with this friend, in which I had been offered an interview at a magazine. The job paid $20,000. This is what a master’s degree at the best journalism school in the country was worth? My education had cost more than twice that much, and that only lasted for nine months or so.

Honestly, I could make more at McDonald’s.

So this friend and I were talking about these jobs, and I mentioned that I had been so disillusioned by journalism that I never wanted to make another reporting phone call again as long as I lived. I wanted to be a critic, an essayist. I wanted to write. Journalism school didn’t kill my love for the written word and for arguing out ideas. For the music of language and every sort of form of expression.

Journalism is not an art.

And in a way, that’s what my friend was saying. When I told him that I didn’t want to call people anymore, he told me something that I had actually heard around the journalism school quite a bit. He didn’t either.

Now, sometimes it’s hard to tell just how much truth there is in anything he says, but what my friend said to me is this:
“It seems like I’m writing stories, and I’ll get to the point where I just have an empty space, and I know what I want to fill it. So I just call people until I can get someone to say what it is that I need them to say.”

I don’t want this to be a condemnation of him, since among the people I’ve met at the J-school, as it’s called, he’s certainly among the most respectable. Maybe I say that only because what he said — whether an honest reflection of his feelings or not — summed up so much of what I feel after eight whole months of indoctrination into the world of “journalism.” Whatever that is. And I’m still not sure, but I have a few ideas. And I think I know — like any self-assured and somewhat pompous critic of anything should — what it should be. Daily journalism is a trade, and a fine one. Some nonfiction is art. Journalism at its finest is a profession. Some journalism, however, aspires to the status of art, and that’s where there’s a problem.

That’s where what I want to do for a living and what Columbia wants me to do for a living don’t ever quite match up. They want us to churn out formula stories — not boring formula stories, mind you — but emotional, balanced, well-reported formula stories just the same. There’s a certain skill to it, and I admire it and read it without qualms. Hell, the Monday before the day I had been talking to this friend (that was a Thursday), I had even sold a story to the New York Times. It was my finest piece of hackwork. It’s a moving story and I’m proud of it.

But boy, journalism’s not for everyone. It’s not even for most. I’m pretty sure it’s not for me.

(End quote)

Flackspeak

2005-07-11T21:23:00.000-04:00

I feel like maybe I was too soft on Pearlstein. Or that I came off too soft on him anyway. I don't mean to say that he made the right stand, on principle, since he does seem to have ruined Time's ability to use anonymous sources. I just meant that I understand his motivation to try to find a third way.

But as I suspected, things are getting more complicated as they get closer to the--so to speak--source. The current lead story on NYTimes.com explains things pretty well. But what it doesn't do is run the entire transcript of the press conference between the White House press pool and Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary. For that, we turn to Editor & Publisher. And again, I thank my friend Kelly for giving me the lead (She didn't request anonymity, so I assume she's on the record):

For those who enjoy making fun of press flacks, reading this transcript of McClellan's dance of avoidance and denial is almost as much fun as reading the transcript of Abbot & Costello's "Who's on First" routine. My favorite moments are the repetitions of "I appreciate your question."

OK, back to the Home Run Derby.

Miller? I don't even know her!

2005-07-06T23:22:00.000-04:00

I don't think that I could go to jail for a principle, but that's because I'm a weakling. At the same time, I'd like to think that there are principles that are important enough to me that I would defend them by going to jail. So I reconcile these two somewhat conflicting thoughts by not putting myself in a position where I might have to choose between not betraying a source and ordering from that good Vietnamese place on Amsterdam whenever I want to.

So this morning, Judith Miller, she of the shoddy WMD reporting, went to jail for (ostensibly) a principle: namely that a reporter who has promised anonymity to a source should not give up that source's name to anyone, be they dressed in black robes or no. A friend and journalism school colleague argued vehemently to me last week that Norman Pearlstein, the editor of Time, Inc., should never have undermined HIS reporter, Matthew Cooper, by having the magazine turn over documents rather than having the reporter himself do it. Cooper, who was being held in contempt in the same case, sleeps at home tonight. This friend argued--and I agree--that while Pearlstein got Cooper out of an ethical jam, he ensured that no sensitive source would ever again speak off the record to Time. If editors and reporters cave, much of the journalism establishment would have it, there will be no more leaks of important information.

So this is where I take a deep breath and try to be a pundit, but it's where I come to one of the many reasons I'm not invited onto those shows. I'm a deliberative sort by nature, but I didn't have quite the gut reaction I expected in this case either. Something is weird here. And we don't know enough to know exactly what is going on. Even the Times's story confused me a little bit. There's Valerie Plame, who was the CIA agent whose name was leaked. This was supposedly in retaliation for an anti-WMD op-ed piece written by her husband. Of course, Judy Miller wrote the dodgy WMD stories for the Times. And of course, even though these confidential sources have now been revealed to the judge, we, the people, don't know who they are (Karl Rove). At least not officially. And it was the leak that was illegal in the first place. But if the judge now knows the sources, why put Miller in jail? Granted, she doesn't seem particularly likable, but that's not a punishable offense.

All of this just leaves me scratching my head as to the motives of Miller (though the LA Times hypothesizes that she's trying for a book deal--which my friend also mentioned, though she did so as a way of saying that a couple months in prison wouldn't be so bad. I continue scratching that same spot on my head about the judge's motives. Miller didn't even write a story about this leak--and Robert Novak did, though he's presumably cooperating. Honestly, even though I think he was wrong, it's Pearlstein's position I most understand. Criticize him for bowing to Time Warner shareholders, but the man also allowed his reporter to stand his ground AND hug his kid tonight.

I meant to say something about how happy I am to see Sarah Vowell subbing for Maureen Dowd, but that can wait a day. It's lights-out and the warden wants us in our bunks.

The Myth of Audience

2005-06-29T15:04:00.000-04:00

Until this moment, I haven't updated this blog since before Groundhog Day. This, of course, means that if I ever had an audience--Rachael, my sister, some high school kid from Prairie du Chien--it is now gone.

But I am going to do something that I tell my students to do when they write: imagine an audience. It's the only way that I can convince myself to make another post. Of course, I never quite knew who to imagine as a blog audience. Someday, maybe I'll elevate myself to a comfortably obscure position of prominence enjoyed by some of my favorite bloggers--Jim Romenesko and Jay Rosen. In certain circles, of course, they are widely read and widely known (Romenesko, especially). But if I were to ask normal people, like, say, my sisters, they wouldn't even recognize the name. That would be a perfectly fine level of recognition.

I tell my students that my ideal reader is my dad. This is not in any way meant as disrespect for my mother, but in some ways my mother, who holds a PhD and works in University administration, is too specialized. My father is an attorney, which to me represents a certain level of education and sophistication, but not necessarily specialization. And he also reads books. For fun. Which is something I personally think should be a requirement for active intelligent citizenship. All of my friends read books (save one, and I'm working on that). My reader, I should hope, has a general awareness of and interest in the world. That's who I'm thinking of when I write--media criticism, architectural reporting, blog entries. Not exactly my dad, but the archetype that my dad represents.

So, imagining that I have an audience that cares about me at all, I will say this, as a follow-up to my last couple of posts in the winter: I have been accepted into the PhD program in Media Studies at Rutgers University. I'm particularly excited to work with David Greenberg, whose book, Nixon's Shadow, I'm currently reading. Greenberg also writes the History Lesson column on Slate. Instead of linking to that though, I thought it would be more appropriate to link to another essay he wrote for Slate, in which he discusses the question of academics' audiences.

Where I'm going (with luck)

2005-01-05T22:33:00.000-05:00

This is the promised follow-up to yesterday's application essay. This is Essay B, in which I was to explain why I want a doctorate in communications, what I wan to study, and what I want to do afterward. Here, in (slightly more than than) the mandated 500 words, is my answer:

Essay B

As a confirmed media junkie, and a subscriber to email newsletters such as Romenesko’s media news weblog and Slate’s daily summary of major papers, a great deal of my interest in pursuing communications as a discipline is self-serving. I do believe, however, that passion for a subject should be a requirement for seeking a doctorate, since I have seen even the most devoted student (in this case, my mother) struggle through a dissertation. I couldn’t imagine doing it without that passion.

I also feel that communications is, in at least one way, the most important of the academic disciplines because of two bridges that it creates. The first is the bridge among the various other disciplines with which it intersects—sociology, history, literature, economics, education, business, law, philosophy, and so on. The second is that it is a discipline that directly affects the public. I believe that one of the journalist’s most important functions is acting as a translator of specific knowledge for a general audience. I think that there is a parallel role for the scholar of communications, especially in his function as media and social critic, as a link between the academy and the culture at large. Some of the best and most influential “public intellectuals” were communications and media scholars even before there were such things.

One of my main areas of interest follows along those lines. As I outline in essay A, I was interested in the act of writing as a career before that interest solidified into a discipline, so I want to look at writers who wrote both fiction and journalism, and at the current bias against nonfiction forms of communication as art. I sense that a convincing link between fiction and nonfiction expression could be made through the application of narratology, and I would like to look into that, and the establishment of a nonfiction canon.

As a nascent educator who has been deeply involved in a large effort to create a “writing and literature” curriculum for my college, I am also excited about studying issues of writing and journalism education. As a Columbia master’s graduate, I’ve closely watched the debate that followed President Bollinger’s committee on the journalism school, and Dean Lemann’s additions and modifications to the curriculum. I’m interested in the professionalization of the craft, and the effort to get past the reputation that Columbia grad A. J. Liebling expressed in saying his journalism education had “all the intellectual status of a training school for future employees of the A&P.”

I am also very interested in media history, law, and ethics, and hope to study those topics as well.
I currently hold a tenure-track position at LaGuardia Community College, where I am very happy, and could return after earning the Ph.D., though I am interested in looking at other academic positions. I love teaching, and hope to continue it; and I think that with both a professional and an academic degree, and experience as both a journalist and an educator, I could offer a lot to colleges that teach both communications and journalism. Wherever I do end up teaching, I want to keep writing, both for an academic audience, and for the public, as a journalist and as a scholar.

Where I'm coming from

2005-01-05T01:25:00.000-05:00

I just finished applying to the Columbia University Ph.D. program in communications, so as a special treat to my loyal reader (singular intended), I'm posting my application essays. Why the heck not?

This first installment, of two, is mostly biographical, but if there's anyone out there who isn't Rachael, I suppose this could give you an idea of how I came to be the (slow to blog) media hound that I am. Next up: why I want to study communications, and what I hope to do with the degree.

Essay A:

When I graduated from high school, I knew only that I wanted to be a writer, but I hadn’t narrowed it down any further than that. I had written maybe six short stories and one 80-some page “spy novel” with more than a small debt to Ian Fleming. But I was already a voracious reader, and language came easily to me, so I called myself a writer when I came to the University of Pennsylvania. I wasn’t then planning on becoming a journalism and communications professor and a media critic, but my academic and professional careers since then have led me clearly in that direction.

At Penn, I majored in English, practically declaring my major before I got to campus. By my junior year, I had almost taken enough literature courses to double major in English and English, and I was so sick of writing academic literary criticism that even though I had taken an interest in teaching, I ruled out a career as an English professor.

In the Fall of 1997, I studied in London, where I read and wrote about more literature, but more importantly had my first encounter with studying criticism, which would become a passion, taking a course in the current London theatre with Michael Billington, the critic for The Guardian. On my return, I took a course with Paul Hendrickson, who was then writing for the Style section of the Washington Post. This class, advanced non-fiction writing, was my first real exposure to journalism, and I liked it enough to change my concentration to creative non-fiction.

I also became involved with the Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s independent student newspaper. The same semester that I took Hendrickson’s course, I became the editor-in-chief of the newspaper’s weekly magazine, 34th Street. The magazine had always incorporated humor and snarky we-know-better-than-the-mainstream music and movie reviews—both of which I loved writing—but I made a real effort to commission magazine-style journalism for the cover stories. This allowed the magazine to hew closer to the traditions of journalistic excellence of its parent publication, where I also sat on the executive board.

That brought me to graduation with a slightly more concrete idea of what I wanted to do with my life. Academe appealed to me in principle, but I had eliminated English as a discipline, and I had thought of journalism more as a profession than as an academic discipline. So I did what every other graduating English major does: I applied to law school.

I also threw in one other application, and that was to the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Despite my innate repulsion at the idea of bugging strangers, I had taken to the idea of journalism because it was a profession that would keep me writing regularly. I hadn’t written a single short story since high school, but loved writing the reviews, essays, and journalism of 34th Street.

While the daily demands of the Fall reporting and writing class forced me to fight my shyness, I turned in work that I was proud of, and the final piece I wrote for the class, about Coney Island’s Wonder Wheel, appeared in the New York Times two weeks after my graduation. At Columbia, I particularly loved two courses. One was the magazine workshop, led by Victor Navasky, where I profiled The New Yorker’s cartoon editor, and wrote about Mad and Esquire. I also loved The Critic as Journalist and Essayist, taught by Michael Janeway. In this course, filled by students from both the journalism school and the school of the arts, I developed critical and essayistic skills that I hope to use in my career, writing media criticism.

While working at Architectural Record, as the magazine’s first web editor, most of my job consisted of reformatting stories from the magazine for publication on the web, which I found unfulfilling. I did, however, participate in the magazine’s award-winning coverage of the World Trade Center attacks and their architectural aftermath, writing a history of the buildings, and interviewing Kenneth Jackson, whose New York City history course I hope to be able to take. My biggest contribution to the magazine was my supervision of a new department devoted to covering young architects. I wrote a monthly profile of a promising emerging designer or firm, and the magazine gave me leeway to choose subjects and to write with style.

Hoping to find more work that I would find as intellectually stimulating as the young architects section, I had sent resumes to several local colleges. In September of 2002, the LaGuardia Community College English Department invited me to teach a journalism course. That academic year, I taught one or two courses per semester, while working half time at Record. Impressed by my student and peer evaluations, and despite my never having taught before, LaGuardia hired me as a full-time, tenure-track lecturer after only two semesters.

As the Department’s only journalist, I was given almost full control of the curriculum. I now regularly teach both the introductory reporting and writing class and a course that serves as an introduction to media studies. This Spring, I will be offering a magazine writing workshop. Outside of class, I developed a major in writing and literature for the College, created a course in creative non-fiction writing, and wrote a proposal to overhaul the Department’s journalism offerings.

I unequivocally love what I do now, teaching college students (despite often staying up until 2:00 a.m. to grade papers), and continuing to write as a freelancer. This mix of the theoretical and the practical has led me back to Columbia’s journalism school, this time to pursue the ideas behind what I do. As I read widely to prepare to teach my courses, I have become engrossed in the literature of media and communications, and I’m ready to study it formally. I’ve finally discovered the type of professor and writer that I want to be, and the Columbia program in Communications is where I want to finish becoming that person.

Hillbilly armor

2004-12-21T21:41:00.000-05:00

A question from my personal gadfly, Rachael:

"is Pitts completely unethical or a brilliant journalist? What say you?"

My thought is that the answer, as you might have guessed, lies somewhere between the two poles you offer, Rachael, though I do lean toward "brilliant journalist." In fact, I think I might clear him entirely if he had disclosed in his article that he had planted the question. Of course, the waters are muddied again because the soldier told some newsweekly--Time, maybe--that he thought the question up himself. That would, of course, absolve Pitts of ethical wrongdoing, but would also strip him of any credit for getting the quote.

In general though, I think the principle you need to follow is that if you can't get access yourself, there's nothing at all wrong with using proxies--so long as the proxies get their credit, and you practice full disclosure.

Game Theory

2004-11-26T02:38:00.000-05:00

All hail the video game critic!

Now I don't play video games much myself. I leave that to my personal video game adviser, Jason, who, frankly, does play video games much. And yet, even though I have no real need for a video game reviewer, I find myself, almost weekly, turning to the "Game Theory" column of the New York Times's Circuits section. Charles Herold is the reviewer there, and he has forged what, for me, is the perfect voice for a critic. He is personable and first-person. He acknowledges conflicting points of view, but stands by his own experience. And he accepts that he has a really fun job.

While I'm at it, I want to give similar kudos to the New York Observer for its movie reviewing (even though I've let my subscription drop). The Observer, the pleasantly pink weekly, also gives its two reviewers real columns where they can develop trustworthy (or otherwise) personae. Of the two, I find the venerable and aged auteurist Andrew Sarris to be a cinematic soul mate, at least when it comes to enjoying movies or not. I rarely ever agree with his counterpart Rex Reed. What's fun is that the Observer lets them overlap from time to time, unlike more staid papers that take an official position.

In short, I like a bit of personality in my criticism. I think it's charmingly old-fashioned--and more accurate.

Saul Survivor

2004-11-20T13:32:00.000-05:00

This week's New Yorker has a story by Roger Angell about the Red Sox winning the World Series. The accompanying illustration is a colored-pencil drawing of a fanciful, physics-defying ballpark. As the work of Saul Steinberg goes, I actually like this piece. And the fact that Steinberg has been dead for five years doesn't change how I feel about the drawing--at least that fact on its own doesn't.

But the late Saul Steinberg may very well be the most frequent contributor to the New Yorker. A couple of weeks ago, he even had a drawing on the cover. Some of these primitivist drawings work for me; some don't. But I'm sick of seeing them.

Steinberg is probably most famous for a cover drawing he did, with Manhattan in the foreground, and everything east of the Hudson river reduced to insignificant specks. While that may accurately reflect my worldview, I don't think it's grounds for continuing to run the man's works approximately every two weeks. And I don't think I'm exaggerating. I find more of the drawings downright bad than good enough to be running in the country's best magazine.

So to the art department of the New Yorker: let's give some living artists a try. I know there are some good ones out there.

Howl, howl, oh Howell!

2004-11-17T23:06:00.000-05:00

My class and I have been discussing Howell Raines, Jayson Blair, and that whole fiasco this week. And since it's verging on a month since I've posted anything to this blog, I thought it appropriate to share this parody I wrote of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."

Howell

By Kevin Lerner, with appropriate apologies

I.
I saw the best writers of a new generation destroy with plagiarism, borrowing
hysterical faking
dragging the gray lady through the negro—not that it mattered that he was negro—streets
at dawn
who passed through the University of Maryland without degree,
who cowered in apartment in Brooklyn, cell phone expense report
West Virginia claimed
who described tobacco fields and interviews never had, cell phone to photographer
lied I’m coming
who racked up corrections, setting A2 records, earning weeks off for mental health,
warnings from Landman
who despite said warnings earns promotion to National, sniper coverage,
Maryland officials exclusive source ghosts
who read avidly the San Antonio Express-News
who told the Observer idiot editors couldn’t catch fabrications and borrowings,
anonymous sources from whole cloth
who refused to fade silently, feeding Pappu Romanesko chatrooms
pundits for weeks
who fueled Jay’s jokes, laugh lines from Letterman, a town hall meeting of those who
strive to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose
who brought down the Raines from heaven and Boyd who stand before you speechless
and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul.

II.
What Sphinx of talent and burnout and too many second chances bashed open our skulls
and brought ignominy to the mighty Ochs and Sulzberger trust, and yet could still
Bragg about his wiles?
Jayson! Jayson whose mind is pure machinery! Whose fingers are ten armies destroying
the Power and the Glory!
Jayson! Jayson! Jayson of Brooklyn, whose mind is running book deals!
Jayson! The low point of 152 years of history!

The Curse of the Bamb-me-no

2004-10-21T01:02:00.000-04:00

Red Sox fans are supposed to be the ones blaming themselves for 86 years of misery, not me. But I'm growing more and more convinced that I'm to blame for the lack of a championship in the Bronx since 2000.

In the Spring of 2000, just before the start of the season, I was interviewed for a job as an editor of Yankees Magazine, the souvenir program. After the first person offered the job had failed a background check, I was given the offer. I thought it over for an evening, and then called back to turn it down. The pay and the working conditions were going to be terrible, though had the Yanks won, I would have gotten a cut of the World Series check and my very own ring.

That summer, I wrote and published an article about that interview experience. It ran in New York Magazine in July. That Fall, the Yankees lost to the Diamondbacks in the Series. They haven't won since, and a few minutes ago, they collapsed monumentally against the Sox. Am I to blame? Probably not. It would be a delusion of grandeur to put myself on a historical plane with the Babe. But when you're a miserable fan--and when all of the world is rooting for you to lose--it's hard not to kick yourself.

Poll-itzer Prizes

2004-10-19T21:14:00.000-04:00

A day after I commented on the Washington Post's Daily Tracking Poll, the New York Times ran its own poll (in conjunction with CBS). But I'm more interested in the sidebar article that tries to explain the methodology behind all of the various news organizations' polls.

I'm thoroughly ambivalent about the idea of polls as journalism, but I do like the fact that this article admits to their being an inexact science. I only wish that the poll itself had been a sidebar to this.

Survey says

2004-10-18T18:56:00.000-04:00

I'm addicted to the Washington Post's Daily Tracking Poll, and I would get the DTs if they took it away.

But I'm convinced it's bad for journalism. Other pundits have talked about how stories covering campaign tactics to the detriment of policy take away from the seriousness of political coverage. I agree, and I think that polls turn politics into a sport. I say this while I'm watching the Yankees. Reason tells me that I should hate the Yankees. They're overpaid, even by Major League Baseball standards. They win more often than any other team. They're inherently unlikeable. And yet I live and die by Yankees games. Several of my New York City colleagues today commented on how they went to bed at 1:30 a.m. today, after watching the Red Sox steal a game from the Yanks. We have an undeniable emotional connection, though, and no amount of reason (including calculations of hours of sleep) can convince us to cheer for another team.

And the same, I believe, is becoming true of politics. I believe that the unwavering certainty that Ron Suskind ascribes to George W. Bush in yesterday's New York Times Magazine is also infecting the electorate--and on both sides of the aisle. And all we care about is win or lose. I'm as much of a victim of this attitude as anyone.

Republicans are sure W will win. Democrats are sure W will win. Bostonians are sure the Sox will lose (and they're right). But despite the positive blip Kerry got in the polls after the debates (which I liken to the Red Sox 12th-inning win last night) served only to give Democrats their requisite moment of faith before sliding back into their resignation.

I watch the Washington Post daily tracking poll like I read the sports scores. I read other papers' polls--and automatically dismiss the ones with which I disagree. Americans, for the most part, know for whom they will vote in two weeks. The rest is box scores.

Catching up

2004-10-17T20:18:00.000-04:00

I've been buried under reading for my classes, and grading student papers, but I have been keeping at least one eye on the media. One night last week, I had to triple-task between the debates, the Yankees, and a stack of papers.

Last week, Daniel Okrent, the Times Public Editor, addressed the question of whether or not the Times is biased toward one campaign or another. I generally tend to agree with his assessment, that no, it's not particularly biased. But then, I also have to admit my liberal tendencies--an admission which may undermine my following argument, but then I don't know what to do about that, except to ask for the reader's trust.

This week, Okrent invited two guest columnists to fill his column. Of course, neither of these columnists agreed with Okrent, which was both predictable, and Okrent's point. Todd Gitlin, a sociologist and journalism professor at Columbia, took the liberal approach, using the argument that being overly "balanced" tipped things in Bush's direction.

Bob Kohn wrote from the Right. He wrote that while the Times may make a good effort to accurately portray Bush's approach to policy, the paper undercuts that evenness by running articles about political issues that fall solidly on the side Bush is not on.

My response to both arguments is the same, and one I have expressed in this space before. One side of an issue can actually be the wrong side of the issue, and mere stenography--which is what Gitlin is accusing the Times of committing--does a disservice to the public. I agree with this, but I direct Gitlin toward Kohn's point. The Times may be committing stenography when it covers what Bush says, but in its surrounding coverage, that error is mitigated. The man, after all, is technically President of the United States, and what he says deserves to be heard, whether or not it is agreed with.

--

In two other notes, the Times Magazine this week ran what I had thought until today was the most important non-covered story of the Presidential election, which is the full story, so much as anyone can access it, of Bush's faith and its effect on government policy. Frank Rich writes about the Bush administration's closed-door press policy, and does so much better than I could, so I leave the story to him.

An opinion can't be wrong, but...

2004-10-06T01:13:00.000-04:00

The New York Times editorial in tomorrow's paper about tonight's VP debate seems to be the result of wishful thinking on the editorialists' part. The editorial seems to think that Edwards was the clear winner of the debate, and while I would wish that were so, I have to disagree.

But this blog is not about my politics. It is about the media. And as American libel law history has made clear, everyone has the right to his opinion, but no one is allowed his own facts. The Times here, seems to be guilty of a little spin of its own in its interpretation of a much fuzzier debate than this editorial describes.

The New York Times Book Review Review

2004-10-05T22:54:00.000-04:00

This weekend, the New York Times unveiled its new designs for its various Arts & Leisure sections and the Book Review. My personal jury is still out on the revisions, but I'm inclined to like them. The general idea seems to have been to move towards a more magazine-like presentation of the material.

Any time you create a "department," as magazines are prone to do, there's going to be a shakedown period. It seems to me that that's where the Times is at the moment, but expect fuller comments from me in the future.

All aboard, America

2004-10-03T23:44:00.000-04:00

Though it's not media in the press sense of the word, advertising does fit. I want to commend Amtrak's recent Northeast corridor advertisements. Though they're thoroughly modern, they capture something of the romance of vinatage Deco train and ship posters.

And you can buy 'em cheap, too.

Senators be damned

2004-09-24T01:36:00.000-04:00

It doesn't pertain exactly to the media, but I wanted to be on the record with this. Assuming Major League Baseball finalizes the move of the Montreal Expos to Washington, DC, I'd like to suggest that they call the team the "Monuments."

My friend Daniel prefers that they be sponsored by the Homeland Security Department, but I stand by my choice. Daniel, however, did seem to like my suggestion that the Washington Monuments play with pointy bats.

Fair and Balanced

2004-09-23T18:39:00.000-04:00

The Chicago Tribune's Public Editor wrote today about reader complaints that his newspaper was not fair and balanced the way a newspaper should be. His answer--which is that the news is a collaborative process and that sometimes reader complaints are valid--is true, but there is more going on, and it's not liberal bias, exactly.

(I do believe that the press has a duty to be "liberal" as part of its mission, but that's another blog. And before you dismiss me as a liberal tool, note the quotation marks; I promise to explain at a later date.)

What's going on in this Tribune case is that the public has been led to believe that journalism should be unbiased (which, in the American tradition, is the standard). But many people interpret this to mean that "there are two sides to every story" and that the newspaperman's job is to lay out all of the facts and let the reader figure out what's true and what's not. It's Fox News's slogan (though not their practice). However, that's not the case.

Not every story has two stories, and not every fact is true, just because someone said it. It's the journalist's job to serve as the filter and to some extent, the analyst of news. And if that means choosing to put one candidate's speech higher on the front page than another, that doesn't equate to bias. Calling statements into question doesn't equate to bias--as long as it's done across the board. That's what it means to be a fair and balanced journalist--not giving equal time and space to all comers.

Union Man

2004-09-22T13:17:00.000-04:00

Here is another story I did this week for Architectural Record. This one is about the architect Thom Mayne and his new design for the Cooper Union in New York.

Tick Tock

2004-09-21T13:12:00.000-04:00

Though CBS has now acknowledged that the Bush memos are forgeries, much about them still remains a mystery. This Washington Post article is the best reporting on the whole process CBS followed (through yesterday) that I've seen.

Inconclusive

2004-09-17T10:35:00.000-04:00

Newspapers have an obligation to report as much information as they have in as accurate a characterization as they can manage.

This morning, USA Today reported that its own poll showed Bush ahead of Kerry. But it stuffs the news that two other polls still have the competitors in a statistical dead heat down in the 8th paragraph. The headline supports the lead (though an abbreviated headline on the website mentions both).

USA Today should not privilege its own poll over equally valid polls in order to have a scoop or even to tout the fact that it conducted a poll in the first place. Give the whole news--which is still that no one knows who's gonna win this thing.

Project Rebirth

2004-09-16T14:10:00.000-04:00

A link to a freelance story I wrote for Architectural Record, where I used to be the web editor. The story is about a film and web site project called Project Rebirth, which will chronicle the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site in time lapse photography.

The Columbia Blogcasting System

2004-09-16T13:40:00.000-04:00

A Wall Street Journal editorial about the CBS News forged documents affair takes the whole incident over into the realm of the debate over the so-called liberal media.

I hope that this does not become that. Dan Rather has a history of being an antagonist of the Bushes, which would certainly raise questions from the right over his impartiality. And, as has been pointed out, the documents really only revived the mostly-accepted idea that Bush skipped out on his duty. This is nothing very new, and the new documents don't do much to support the story. So motives are suspect, and Dan Rather would have done himself and CBS a favor by waiting for more conclusive proof before going with the story. That's a lesson for journalism students.

On the other hand though, pundits seem to be celebrating the bloggers for somehow uncovering these forgeries. I need to point out that these documents have not yet been proven forgeries. All the bloggers did was complain and raise some conspiracy theories. And so far, that's all anyone has on any side: conspiracy theories. The WSJ editorial raised the possibility that the Kerry campaign or the Democrats fed Rather the documents. But the other side of the fence (The WSJ is notoriously conservative) is just as paranoid. In her column this morning, Maureen Dowd talked of rumors that Karl Rove is behind the documents. In this twisted scenario, Rove fed CBS the papers, knowing that they would be discredited, so that people would stop talking about Bush's lackluster service record, and talk instead about how the Dems planted these documents (see the WSJ editorial).

Neither one of these scenarios is immediately plausible, but they both seem more likely than the idea that Dan Rather or CBS is intentionally duping the American public with false documents. As the media writer Ken Auletta pointed out, 60 Minutes is still the best network TV news magazine, and its heritage certainly points toward good journalistic judgment. And CBS better figure out what happened before some enterprising blogger actually moves from skepticism and punditry and does some reporting. If that happens, then bloggers would really have accomplished something.

I'd Rather not

2004-09-15T20:28:00.000-04:00

...to paraphrase Bartleby. I've been intentionally avoiding comment on the 60 Minutes 2 uproar about the forged--or not--documents from Bush's Air National Guard service.

There has been much praise of the "blogosphere" for uncovering this "story." And while as a newbie blogger myself, I do think that there is merit to that sort of scrambling angry personal-opinion journalism. But I just watched the follow-up to the story in which Bush's superior's secretary said she thought the documents were forged, but that the ideas were not. A sort of third way.

Is this ass-covering on Rather's part? Maybe. But we can't really know what's going on, since we weren't wherever it was that these memos made their way to CBS. I can't imagine that CBS made this up, as some blogging conspiracy theorists have suggested. I CAN imagine that someone did. But I could be wrong, and anything I say is speculation.

Which is why we need good, professional journalists, too. Bloggers may have outed the documents, but they're not going to solve the mystery.

Today's thoughts on Today

2004-09-14T21:30:00.000-04:00

Ew, never mind. Kitty Kelley overload. A five minute segment, maybe. Three days in a row? Ew. Forget my praise of NBC. Make her go away.

Lipp service

2004-09-14T01:23:00.000-04:00

I'm reading 'The Elements of Journalism' by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel for the class I'm teaching. I came across this quote in Chapter one, apropos of what I was saying about the reading public:

According to K+R, Walter Lippmann said, "People... mostly know the world only indirectly, through 'pictures they make up in their heads.' And they receive these mental pictures largely through the media. The problem, Lippmann argued, is that the pictures most people have in their heads are hopelessly distorted and incomplete, marred by the irredeemable weaknesses of the press."

That's really what I meant, I suppose, when I rashly accused the American reading public of being stupid. These flawed mental pictures, I think, could be at least partly repaired by reputable news organizations (though Lippmann was writing in 1922, so even radio was a new thing), but the pictures are too heavily influenced by TV for even a particularly strong photograph to change their minds, let alone a well-reported and written story.

It's worse than I thought

2004-09-14T01:06:00.000-04:00

Daniel Fienberg supplied me with some more up-to-date figures on Fox's convention ratings. President Bush's speech apparently topped 7.3 million viewers.

The high road is under construction

2004-09-13T22:28:00.000-04:00

This op-ed from the Washington Post was brought to my attention. In it, Bryan Keefer, an editor at CJR's laudable Campaign Desk. In it, he pleads for a a more high-minded journalism from the more high-minded papers. His enumerated suggestions for more mature coverage--in order to appeal to us younger readers (he's 26; I'm 27) are great, but I think that they're unrealistic.

While I agree with what he's asking for, which is an end to the scoop mentality, I don't think he's going to get it. And I hate to beat the same healthy, nay (neigh?) thriving horse, but it's outlets like Fox News that cause serious publications like the Times and the Post to have to address these allegations. Because the newspaper with the biggest circulation in this country, USA Today, only reaches 2 million people. Does that sound like a lot? Well, it's not. It's pathetic how few people read newspapers. And it's USA Today, which while it's more credible than its McPaper reputation would have you believe, it's still not the NYT or the WP.

Fox, on the other hand--and the other news networks--reach much bigger audiences. During the Republican Convention, Fox was reaching audiences of nearly 6 million (Reuters, via Yahoo News). And as long as anyone sees Fox as a credible news source, the so-called "news" that comes out of it is going to have to be addressed by the real papers. Maybe they haven't been doing a great job of it, but if they went completely high-minded, they run the risk of becoming irrelevant to the vast majority of Americans--who, let me remind you, are, frankly, stupid. I believe in the general goodness of mankind, but we are not a country of independent thinkers (see Mencken's booboisie). Bryan Keefer and I wish that we were.

Lauering my standards

2004-09-13T11:15:00.000-04:00

This is a position I may someday regret taking, but feel that Matt Lauer of NBC's Today Show has become at the very least a competent interviewer. I base that on his interview this morning of Kitty Kelley, and on his interview of President Bush last week. That was the interview, you may remember, in which Bush said that he didn't think the war on terror could ever be won.

Kitty Kelley wrote a book about the Bush family in which she accuses George W. of using cocaine at Camp David. I haven't read that, so I won't comment on HER journalism. But I applaud, first of all, NBC, for pushing through with its announced interview with Kelley despite reported pressure from the White House not to run it at all. That's probably one benefit of media consolidation: if you're owned by GE, you're practically as big as the government, so you can stand up to them. Lauer also did a more than plausible job. With both Bush and Kelley, he stood his ground, thought on his feet, and was astute enough to ask a question again if it wasn't answered the first time. If I were CJR, I'd give Lauer a laurel.

Booboisie

2004-09-13T07:10:00.000-04:00

My Bartleby daily email was late in getting to me yesterday (in fact I only got it this morning). Otherwise I would have known that yesterday, the 12th, was H.L. Mencken's birthday.

It's a milestone important to any crotchety press critic.

And speaking of crotchety, I also want to acknowledge an objection from Daniel Fienberg, a friend of mine who writes and regularly posts his work to the web. It wasn't so much that I forgot about him when I was writing the original acknowledgements in this blog, as my making a subconscious distinction between my amateur blogging and his professional work.

Another note from SPJ

2004-09-12T21:29:00.000-04:00

One of my personal highlights from SPJ was seeing Sreenath Sreenivasan, who was never really my professor, but he was the adviser of the Columbia SPJ chapter. He gave a seminar on how journalists can better use the web, but a lot of these resources are great for non-journalists, too. A link to his web surfing tips:

Smarter Surfing: Better Use of Your Web Time

Fried Okrent

2004-09-12T13:05:00.000-04:00

My primary newspaper is the New York Times. I feel like I should be morally obligated to read five or so newspapers every morning: the Times, the Washington Post, one or both of the major NYC tabloids, those free papers they've started handing out on the subway, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. Which is an important paper, even if it's easy to make fun of.

Today marks the return of Daniel Okrent, the Times's Public Editor. In that same ethics panel I mentioned yesterday, Al Siegal (and I'm going to fudge the quote here again), was asked why the Times didn't call the position an ombudsman.

"Two reasons," he said. "One is that the Washington Post's Mike Getler so fully emodies the term." He said it wasn't quite a copyright that the Post had on ombudsmen, but he didn't want to compete. The other reason made a little bit more sense to me. An ombudsman, Siegal said, had two primary respoonsibilities: writing a weekly column, and circulating a memo to the Post's staff about standards and practices. The Public Editor only writes the column (and it's fortnightly).

Here's what Okrent said he's going to be watching in the last nine months of his term:

"The list is long - corrections policy, book reviewing, the use of "experts," loaded language, Middle East coverage, honesty in photographs, what the editors mean by "news analysis" (not to mention "White House Letter," "Political Memo" and various other ways they say "not a news story")."

Siegal and Okrent were both results of the Blair affair, so I'll use one to answer the other on the first point. Siegel said that reporters will often come to him with a new piece of information about a published story and ask him "Is this worth a correction?" He says he responds by asking the reporters if they would write the story the same way today knowing what they know. The answer is always yes, and his advice is always to run a correction. Now whether that is policy or just a public stance, I don't know.

I'm particularly interested to see what comes out of his book review investigation, the language thing, and honesty in photographs--this last one because I'm teaching a freshman liberal arts cluster on ethics and journalism, and one of the courses I'm working with is a photojournalism course. And I'm always very interested in the creeping of opinion and analysis onto the front page, which is the last thing Okrent mentions. I have my own thoughts on whether this is a good or a bad thing.

My first clarification

2004-09-12T01:50:00.000-04:00

At the SPJ conference today (well, technically yesterday now), Al Siegal, of the Siegal Commission that investigated Jayson Blair, made an interesting comment at the ethics panel presentation. I'm going to be completely unethical now and reconstruct his quote, but he was talking about reporters who objected to having corrections run on their stories.

"I have a hard time convincing them that it's not a moral failure to have a correction run," he said (or so he said once I've stuffed the words back into his mouth). "It's a chance to make the story more accurate."

See, now I know that's not right, since the way he said it, it actually didn't sound like a moral failure. At any rate, all of that is by way of introducing my first correction, from a "source" whose sentiments, she claimed, I misrepresented. I quote here from Rachael Goldfarb's email:

"I'm flattered and touched by the dedication (although my "claiming to like what [you] write" is arguably a poor word choice since I do indeed enjoy your writing very much -- I'm not claiming to; it's fact.)"

In my own defense (and modesty), I say that I had to regard what she said as merely a claim, since I couldn't fathom her liking my writing as much as she (that word again) claims to. (I'm tempted here to use a smiley, but it's much to early in the blog to resort to emoticons.)

First things

2004-09-12T00:50:00.000-04:00

The occasion of doing a first of anything makes one prone to ponder infinity. But pondering infinity makes me physically naseous, so I won't. I'm more inclined to say a little something about my own writing and how I think this might help it, and to do a little bit of explanation of what I expect this blog to do. That seems only appropriate for a first post, though perhaps a little hackneyed.

So about me, first, with a promise to segue into writing, with the thoughts behind the blog as a rousing conclusion.

I used to write effortlessly. In high school, the idea of tossing off a short story on a Saturday night was just about the easiest thing I could think of--at an age when I was really expected to be thinking only of tossing off. I even wrote an 80-page "novel" at one point. It was sort of a cliched James Bond-ish spy novel with lots of sex in it (so I wasn't too far off from the expected behavior). But then something happened in college. Mostly, college happened. And fiction got left behind (and probably rightly so) for the (at the time) more important pursuits of papers and exams. And while I loved the writing I did for 34th Street magazine, which was the campus entertainment rag, I felt somehow like that should be the end of my writitng for fun. It was becoming time to earn a living. And somehow I ended up in journalism school.

There will be plenty of time to discuss my feelings on journalism school, I'm sure, so I'll gloss over that, lingering just long enough to make it clear that while I love the job I have now, I don't think that I was cut out to be a reporter, per se.

And yet then there's this blog. And Blogging is something that was discussed at the convention of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) this weekend. I think that in the right hands, a blog could actually bring a return to the more experiential journalism that I most enjoy reading. The kind that's written at a cafe table as the Nazis advance, but the writer still has a glass of beaujolais next to his Remington portable, Nazis be damned. I think that the blog has a real chance to return the meaning to the term "correspondent."

But that's not what I really want to do with this necessarily. Of course, I do hope that the blog will be somehow experiential. But I also hope, as the title I picked might suggest in its Lieblingesque way, to bring a critical eye to the world, and especially to the media. I am a journalist by training, and an academic by heart and by employment. So you can expect some journalism to show up in this blog, but you should also expect some ranting and raving--albeit informed ranting and raving--about the activities of the press, and well, anything else I damn well please. What books I'm reading. Movies I've seen. Politics. My friends.

Speaking of friends, I had started this blog several months ago with a completely different first post, and I dedicated that now-defunct, one-post blog to my friend Rachael, who is currently slogging through the first weeks of her second year of law school. I did so because she's a fellow press junkie, and because she claims to enjoy reading my writing. But I want to make a fuller dedication with this revamped blog. So it's to my Mom, who taught me to be questioning and critical (and more importantly, she instilled in me the love of a cheap pun). It's to my Dad, who in many ways is my ideal reader. It's to my sisters, one of whom is stubbornly opposed to the idea of critical thinking, on principle. The other is still celebrating her 9/11 birthday in the Central Time Zone.

And of course, everything has to be dedicated to Paul. Because he has to hear me spout all this crap first, and yet he keeps coming back for more.