Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Rosen’s Trust Puzzler: What Explains Falling Confidence in the Press?

April 17th, 2012 by Jay Rosen

Help me figure it out. Here are five explanations, each of them a partial truth. As you can see from the chart, the percentage of Americans who had a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the news media has declined from over 70 percent shortly after Watergate to about 44 percent today. [...]

I’m There, You’re Not, Let Me Tell You About It

March 27th, 2012 by Jay Rosen

A Brief Essay on the Origins of Authority in Journalism A few months ago at PressThink, I published Voice of San Diego’s guidelines for new reporters. They say: Write with authority. You earn the right to write with authority by reporting and working hard. Which is true. The way I like to phrase that idea [...]

NPR Tries to Get its Pressthink Right

February 26th, 2012 by Jay Rosen

It now commits itself to avoiding the worst excesses of “he said, she said” journalism. It says to itself that a report characterized by false balance is a false report. It introduces a new and potentially powerful concept of fairness: being “fair to the truth.” My verdict: Bravo, NPR. Within the world of pressthink there [...]

Interview as Train Wreck: Susan G. Komen Foundation meets Andrea Mitchell

February 3rd, 2012 by Jay Rosen

Professionals in crisis communication will be talking about this interview for years. Watch the clip. (It’s excruciating.) Read my analysis, which won’t capture everything. Then add your observations in the comments. Andrea Mitchell of NBC News interviews Nancy Brinker, CEO and founder of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, about the foundation’s decision [...]

From the Expense Column to the Revenue Stream: Q & A With Tracy Samantha Schmidt

January 31st, 2012 by Jay Rosen

A young journalist for the Tribune Company becomes a product manager and money maker by acting entrepreneurially inside a large organization. Her big idea: Teaching the Web to the people formerly known as the advertisers. “Where’s the money going to come from?” has been the top question in journalism for several years now. Over the [...]

Agnew’s Resentment Machine: Six Data Points About Culture War and The Campaign Press

January 23rd, 2012 by Jay Rosen

The conservative movement’s warmaking around the “liberal media” is a joke to the people who are actually running for president as conservatives. Data point 1. Vice President Spiro Agnew, speech delivered at Des Moines, Iowa, November 13, 1969 A raised eyebrow, an inflection of the voice, a caustic remark dropped in the middle of a [...]

So whaddaya think: should we put truthtelling back up there at number one?

January 12th, 2012 by Jay Rosen

Somewhere along the way, telling truth from falsehood was surpassed by other priorities to which the press felt a stronger duty. Arthur Brisbane, public editor of the New York Times, was unaware of this history when he asked users of the Times whether reporters should call out false statements. Brisbane’s post, Should The Times Be [...]

Too Much Innovation at the Washington Post? My Q & A with the Post’s Ombudsman

January 10th, 2012 by Jay Rosen

“I am not a person who thinks the fundamentals of journalism have changed that much, despite social media. Of course it’s more conversational, engaging. And the online world has changed reporting somewhat, but not fundamentally.” This week the ombudsman of the Washington Post wrote: Is The Post innovating too fast? The column wonders if the [...]

A Viewer’s Guide to Iowa Caucus Coverage

January 3rd, 2012 by Jay Rosen

“The Iowa Caucuses are presented as a news event, a mini-election with an informational outcome, a winner. But what they really are is a ritual, the gathering of a tribe, which affirms itself and its place in our political system by staging this thing every four years.” I have been observing and commenting on campaign [...]

Politifact Chose the Vice of the Year but They Called it a Lie. That was Dumb.

December 22nd, 2011 by Jay Rosen

You can get mad at your friends, right? I mean… that’s allowed. I am mad at my friends at Politifact because I believe in what they are doing, I think it’s important work, I’ve even helped them do it in a couple of small ways, and now they’ve gone and made it impossible for me [...]

Introduction

"We need to keep the press from being absorbed into The Media. This means keeping the word press, which is antiquated. But included under its modern umbrella should be all who do the serious work in journalism, regardless of the technology used. The people who will invent the next press in America--and who are doing it now online--continue an experiment at least 250 years old. It has a powerful social history and political legend attached..." Read more
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- Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press "
  In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized– connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding. I will try to explain why. It’s easily the [...]
  " Read more The People Formerly Known as the Audience:
  “You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.”
  Read more Migration Point for the Press Tribe:
  “Like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them. When to leave. Where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life. They have to ask if what they know is portable.”
  Read more Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over:
  “Here is one advantage bloggers have in the struggle for reputation– for the user’s trust. They are closer to the transaction where trust gets built up on the Web. There’s a big difference between tapping a built-up asset, like the St. Pete Times ‘brand,’ and creating it from scratch.”
  Read more “Where’s the Business Model for News, People?”
  “It’s remarkable to me how many accomplished producers of those goods the future production of which is in doubt are still at the stage of asking other people, “How are we going to pay our reporters if you guys don’t want to pay for our news?’”
  Read more National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News This American Life’s great mortgage crisis explainer, The Giant Pool of Money, suggests that “information” and “explanation” ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems. Read more The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us.
  “Just so you know, ‘the media’ has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not ‘get behind’ candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy… or gal. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing..”
  Read more They’re Not in Your Club but They Are in Your League: Firedoglake at the Libby Trial:
  “I’m just advising Newsroom Joe and Jill: make room for FDL in your own ideas about what’s coming on, news-wise. Don’t let your own formula (blog=opinion) fake you out. A conspiracy of the like minded to find out what happened when the national news media isn’t inclined to tell us might be way more practical than you think.”
  Read more Twilight of the Curmudgeon Class:
  “We’re at the twilight of the curmudgeon class in newsrooms and J-schools. (Though they can still do a lot of damage.) You know they’re giving up when they no longer bother to inform themselves about what they themselves say is happening.”
  Read more Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality
  “The important thing is to show integrity– not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well.”
  Read more A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism
  “It’s mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the ‘so-called’ from in front? With video!.”
  Read more The Master Narrative in Journalism:
  “Were ‘winning’ to somehow be removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend. For how do you keep the story running while a switch is made?”
  Read more He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User
  “Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who’s faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in.”
  Read more Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism:
  “It’s a “put up or shut up” moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like… distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting… and put them to work to break news?”Read more Introducing NewAssignment.Net:
  “Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn’t, couldn’t or didn’t.”Read more What I Learned from Assignment Zero
  “Here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results.”
  Read more If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn’t. So Let’s Get a Clue:
  “Those in journalism who want to bring ethics to blogging ought to start with why people trust (some) bloggers, not with an ethics template made for a prior platform operating as a closed system in a one-to-many world.”Read more The View From Nowhere:
  “Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for ‘vocal critic,’ and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism.”
  Read more Rollback:
  “This White House doesn’t settle for managing the news–what used to be called ‘feeding the beast’–because there is a larger aim: to roll back the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country.”Read more Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind’s Scoop:
  “”Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are different ideas. We shouldn’t fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004.”
  Read more Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press:
  “Savviness–that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, ‘with it,’ and unsentimental in all things political–is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain.”
  Read more Journalism Is Itself a Religion:
  “We’re headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. The Net is opening things up, shifting the power to publish around. Consumers are becoming producers, readers can be writers.”Read more News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation:
  “Some of the pressure the blogs are putting on journalists shows up, then, in the demand for “news as conversation,” more of a back-and-forth, less of a pronouncement. This is an idea with long roots in academic journalism that suddenly (as in this year) jumped the track to become part of the news industry’s internal dialogue.”
  Read more Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die:
  “An industry that won’t move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don’t have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise.”
  Read more Grokking Woodward:
  “Woodward and Bernstein of 1972-74 didn’t have such access, and this probably influenced–for the better–their view of what Nixon and his men were capable of. Watergate wasn’t broken by reporters who had entree to the inner corridors of power. It was two guys on the Metro Desk.”Read more Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate:
  “This here is a post for practically everyone in the game of seizing on media bias and denouncing it, which is part of our popular culture, and of course a loud part of our politics. And this is especially for the ‘we’re fair and balanced, you’re not’ crowd, wherever I may have located you.”Read more Bill O’Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News:
  “O’Reilly feeds off his own resentments–the establishment sneering at Inside Edition–and like Howard Beale, the ‘mad prophet of the airwaves,’ his resentments are enlarged by the medium into public grievances among a mass of Americans unfairly denied voice.”
  Read more Thoughts on the Killing of a Young Correspondent:
  “Among foreign correspondents, there is a phrase: ‘parachuting in.’ That’s when a reporter drops into foreign territory during an emergency, without much preparation, staying only as long as the story remains big. The high profile people who might parachute in are called Bigfoots in the jargon of network news. The problem with being a Bigfoot, of course, is that it’s hard to walk in other people’s shoes.”Read more The Abyss of Observation Alone.
  “There are hidden moral hazards in the ethic of neutral observation and the belief in a professional ‘role’ that transcends other loyalties. I think there is an abyss to observation alone. And I feel it has something to do with why more people don’t trust journalists. They don’t trust that abyss.”
  Read more “Find Some New Information and Put it Into Your Post.” Standards for Pro-Am Journalism at OffTheBus:
  “Opinion based on information ‘everyone’ has is less valuable than opinion journalism based on information that you dug up, originated, or pieced together. So it’s not important to us that contributors keep opinion out. What’s important is that they put new information in. Read more Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media:
  “What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never.”
  Read more The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism
  “It’s pirate radio, legalized; it’s public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we’re closer to a vision of ‘producer democracy’ than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform.”
  Read more No One Owns Journalism:
  “And Big Media doesn’t entirely own the press, because if it did then the First Amendment, which mentions the press, would belong to Big Media. And it doesn’t. These things were always true. The weblog doesn’t change them. It just opens up an outlet to the sea. Which in turn extends ‘the press’ to the desk in the bedroom of the suburban mom, where she blogs at night.”Read more Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!:
  “How is it you know you’re the press? Because you have a pass that says PRESS, and people open the gate. The locker room doors admit you. The story must be inside that gate; that’s why they give us credentials. We get closer. We tell the fans what’s going on. And if this was your logic, Bill James tried to bust it. Fellahs, said he to the baseball press, you have to realize that youare the gate.”
  Read more Psst…. The Press is a Player:
  “The answer, I think, involves an open secret in political journalism that has been recognized for at least 20 years. But it is never dealt with, probably because the costs of facing it head on seem larger than the light tax on honesty any open secret demands. The secret is this: pssst… the press is a player in the campaign. And even though it knows this, as everyone knows it, the professional code of the journalist contains no instructions in what the press could or should be playing for?”
  Read more Die, Strategy News:
  “I think it’s a bankrupt form. It serves no clear purpose, has no sensible rationale. The journalists who offer us strategy news do not know what public service they are providing, why they are providing it, for whom it is intended, or how we are supposed to use this strange variety of news.”Read more He Said, She Said, We Said:
  “When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report ‘what happened.’”
  Read more If Religion Writers Rode the Campaign Bus:
  “Maybe irony, backstage peaking and “de-mystify the process” only get you so far, and past that point they explain nothing. Puzzling through the convention story, because I’m heading right into it myself, made me to realize that journalism’s contempt for ritual was deeply involved here. Ritual is newsless; therefore it must be meaningless. But is that really true?.”Read more Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat:
  “‘A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show,’ he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event. The show takes place inside a bubble, which is a security perimeter overseen by the Secret Service. If you go outside the bubble for any reason, you become a security risk until you are screened again by hand.”Read more What Time is it in Political Journalism?
  “Adam Gopnik argued ten years ago that the press did not know who it was within politics, or what it stood for. There was a vacuum in journalism where political argument and imagination should be. Now there are signs that this absence of thought is ending.”
  Read more Off the Grid Journalism:
  “The assignment was straightforward enough,” writes Marjie Lundstrom of the Sacramento Bee, “talk to people.” When a writer dissents from it or departs from it, the master narrative is a very real thing. Here are two examples: one from politics, one from music.Read more
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