Today's Word on Journalism

"In order to enjoy the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils that it creates."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, French commentator on the American experiment, 1835



That quotation comes from Ted Pease's Today's Word on Journalism, a daily email that contains a quotation about some aspect of journalism. Ted is a professor at Utah State and has a world-class sense of humor, particularly when he directs it at himself. His email is always a delight to read. You can subscribe by sending a "subscribe" message to Ted at tpease@cc.usu.edu. (The drawing to the right is de Tocqueville, not Ted.) More quotations about journalism -- many of them coming from Ted -- can be found at this page on JPROF.




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Couric takes over

In the long history of the CBS Evening News, there had been only three permanent anchors: Douglas Edwards, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. Now there is a fourth. Katie Couric CBS biography) debuted as the newscast's latest anchor last night. Couric is a legitimate journalist who was part of NBC's news team covering the Pentagon and the Gulf War in 1991. For the last 15 years she has been the host of NBC's Today Show, and her work has not been considered to be on the front lines of reporting. Her main job at CBS is not to deliver the news but to deliver an audience (preferably one that is a little younger than the one CBS has). Here are a few stories and reviews of her first night: New York Times, Washington Post, NPR.



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The iconic image

Few of us get to leave the impression that Joe Rosenthal did.

Rosenthal was the 33-year-old Associated Press photographer who took the picture of Marines raising the flag during the fierce battle of Iwo Jima in the Pacific in 1945.

That image struck an instant chord with viewers, and it has been stuck in our consciousness ever since. It has been reproduced millions of times in many forums and is the basis for the giant Marine memorial that overlooks the nation's capital.

Rosenthal was an excellent photographer during his entire career -- not just a guy with a camera at the right place and time. He died on Sunday at the age of 94.

(Check out what the San Francisco Chronicle, the newspaper where he worked for many years, had to say about him; also take a look at the retrospective at Poynter.)

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News orgs discover web's immediacy

A couple of stories from Romenesko’s blog on today show that big time news organizations are discovering the immediacy of the web.

One comes from Westworld, which reports that when the Denver Post stumbled onto a scoop last month about beer magnate Peter Coors being arrested for drunk driving, the Post nailed the story and then put it on the organization’s web site – despite some grousing from the traditionalists. These folks thought a story like that should be saved for print first, which was several hours away. The paper’s managing editor said the web would be “our breaking news platform.”

Then there is the story about CBS streaming its nightly news program simultaneously with its over-the-air broadcast. This, apparently, has come about only after painstaking negotiations with affiliates.

One is tempted to ask: “Where have these folks been for the last 10 years or so?”



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Seeing and believing

This week's incidents of photo-doctoring of pictures from Lebanon that have been published by some news organizations have provoked a good deal of outrage and hand-wringing.

So they should.

Changing a photograph in a way that alters its meaning -- even if only incidentally -- is not a good thing for journalists or journalism. We have been reading about this sort of thing far too much these days, and unfortunately, we will probably continue to hear about such behavior.

But in an article in Slate ("Don't Believe What You See in the Papers"), Jim Lewis has some valuable perspective on how we view photography. A photograph has power because we believe it; we think that if we had been standing beside the photographer when it was taken, we would have seen the same thing. That's not true, and Lewis does a good job of reminding us of that fact.

Lewis also links to a "rogue's gallery" of digital manipulation put together by Dartmouth's Haney Farid that reminds us that this sort of thing happens on a regular basis.



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An expensive comma

Sometimes punctuation can be expensive.

That was certainly the case for Rogers Communications of Canada, which recently found that its misreading of a contract -- not recognizing the meaning of the placement of a comma in a particular sentence of a contract -- will cost the company a couple of million dollars. All this is according an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Rogers had a contract to put cable lines across thousands of untility polls in the Maritimes. Rogers thought the agreement was good for at least five years because of the sentence that the agreement "shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successfive year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party."

The contract was with Aliant, Inc. More than a year ago, Aliant informed Rogers that it was giving notice that it was scrapping the contract based on that sentence. Rogers argued that its understanding was that the contract, which was still in its first five-year period, could not be disgarded so easily.

But the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission disagreed.

The comma, the commission said, gave Aliant the right to cancel the contract during the first five years with only a year's notice. Alient will do so, and renotiating the contract will cost Rogers about $2 million.

A high price to pay for overlooking a comma.



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Plagiarism: Unconscious and unintentional?

Writing is one of the most conscious and intentional acts a human can undertake. Constructing a phrase or sentence is a high-level mental activity (akin, I tell my students, to doing a complex math problem).

That's why Kaavya Viswanathan's excuse – or, at least, explanation – for the plagiarism in her novel How Opal Mehta Go Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life sounds so odd.

She admitted the plagiarism but said, in typical 21st century fashion, it was "unconscious and unintentional," according to a New York Times report. It's as if she wants us to believe that she was writing in her sleep.

This piece is not meant to beat up on Ms. Viswanathan. She is only 19 years old and what she has been through during the past two weeks has undoubtedly destroyed a major part of her life's plan. She had gotten a novel published early in life and had a contract for another. Now, all that is gone.

While the plagiarism is maddening, one can feel sorry for her personally. Plagiarism is theft, and she did it and got caught – in a very public way. Her career as a writer is likely over. Little, Brown, her publisher, has announced that it will not be publishing the second novel.

It will take time and effort for her to move away from all of this.

She could start by giving up the "unconscious and unintentional" excuse. She may not have understood the seriousness of what she was doing when she did it, but the fact remains that she did it. Her acts were both conscious and intentional.

Writing is like that.



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The writing life, Gay Talese style

For more than 40 years, there has been intense interest in the writing style exemplified by Gay Talese – and in Gay Talese (web site) himself.

But that emphasis, particularly in Talese himself, may have been misplaced. Talese is certainly a writer of utmost grace. He works at his profession with an intensity that is rare.-

But what distinguishes him is not his writing but his reporting.
Talese has produced a number of important and interesting magazine articles and books, most famously “Frank Sinatra has a cold” (Esquire, April 1966), The Kingdom and the Power, Honor Thy Father, and Thy Neighbor’s Wife, among many others. In some of these, he has been a minor or major character.

Now he is about to publish a memoir, A Writer’s Life, which talks about his methods of reporting and writing. The book and Talese were profiled in the New York Times last week (“Gay Talese’s New Memoir Emerges After 14 Tortured Years”) by Charles McGrath.

. . . In the late 60's, when he was working on "Honor Thy Father," his book about the Bonanno crime family, he moved in for a while with Bill Bonanno and his bodyguards, and in the early 80's, while working on "Unto the Sons," he suddenly decamped for Calabria. Most famously, in the early 70's, while working on "Thy Neighbor's Wife," a book about sexual liberation in America, he went native for an extended period — far longer, his critics claimed, than his research strictly required — managing massage parlors in New York and living for a while at Sandstone, a nudist swingers' colony in California.

Talese is a graduate of the University of Alabama, where I taught for 25 years. Several years ago, he returned to campus to receive a writing award that my college gave him, and two of my faculty colleagues and I had dinner with him one evening.

I told him the story of when I was an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee in 1970 and had just finished The Kingdom and the Power. The book had been written like a novel, and I wondered how he could have gotten inside the minds of all of the people he described in the book. He had to have speculated or made good guesses, I thought.

No, he said, there was nothing in the book that he had made up or speculated on; everything was the result of interviews (sometimes many interviews) and observation.

Talese went on in that conversation to describe his work methods, which include intensive concentration on his subjects and hours of taking and transcribing notes. He is meticulous in the construction of his sentences and paragraphs, revising and constantly questioning his prose. His standards are high, exacting and tortuous.

But Talese doesn’t make it up. He is not a novelist, although as a pioneer of the New Journalism writing style, he uses some of the techniques of fiction. He is a journalist, and as he said recently, “Nonfiction takes no liberty with the facts.”

Above all, Talese is a reporter.



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The death of the clever headline?

Headline writing is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism and certainly one of the most difficult things to teach for the journalism professor. Now -- as if accuracy, clarity and a bit of wite weren't enough -- there is a new challenge: search engines. Steve Lohr writes this week in the New York Times about how news organizations are tweaking headlines in an effort to get their links picked by Google and its kin and thus drawing readers to the site. If the Google consideration becomes a major one, we could see yet another shift in the practice of journalism.

More

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The Newspaper Problem, in a nutshell

The sports editor of my local newspaper wrote a column this weekend that, inadvertently, summed up much of what is wrong with American newspapers. (He and the newspaper will remain un-named and un-linked.)

The column must have been in reaction to some criticism the sports department had received from high school sports partisans. The newspaper had apparently not given enough attention to the schools of these partisans, and they were accusing the sports department of bias.

The sports editor had grown a bit testy with these folks.

In an area that includes over 40 high schools, seven colleges and numerous other sports activities, it’s impossible for a seven-person staff to be everywhere everyday.

Just do the math. We haven’t learned the trick of making five loaves of bread and two fish feed 5,000. Sorry.

Until we learn how to do that, we depend on the coaches throughout the area. Without their diligence to call in results from games that we’re unable to cover, readers and supporters of those schools would not see the results in the next day’s paper.

Despite his testiness, one can sympathize with the editor. Seven people on the sports staff? He could probably use three times that many.

But the significant fact here, I think, is that people were complaining. They thought that the newspaper wasn’t serving them, and they cared enough to take the time and effort to say so.

And what was the newspaper’s response to this concern?

Do the math.

The math, of course, does not concern simply asking an underpaid seven-person staff to do an impossible job. Rather, and more significantly, it has to do with the fact that newspapers like this one operate at 15 to 20 percent profit margins (far higher than most other businesses), and they do so because they are a monopoly – the only game in town. The math also concerns the failure of newspapers to invest in improving the quality of their product by hiring more staff and paying them a decent wage. Instead, they have done exactly the opposite – cutting back on staff and staff development and keeping salaries and benefits for editorial and news people as low as possible.

Today the newspaper industry is aflutter with concerns about losing readers and tanking advertising revenue. “What shall we do?” the publishers wail. In the face of this, a newspaper should look at readers who complain about lack of coverage as a blessing. It means that, maybe, there is an audience out there that still cares.

But what has been the newspaper's response? A seven-person sports staff.
And what will be the readers' reaction? Will they say, as the sports editor seems to want them to say, "Oh, ok, we understand. Hey, those profit margins have to be maintained. Thanks for trying."

Or will they say to the newspaper just what the sports editor has said to them:

Do the math.



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60 Minutes and Tiger Woods

CBS's "60 Minutes" is being roundly criticized for a segment that aired a couple of weeks ago on golfing phenom Tiger Woods. The piece asked no tough or searching questions of Woods, who rarely gives interviews and has carefully honed his image throughout his career. Defending the show's approach to Woods, producer Jeff Fagin asked, "Should everybody who goes on '60 Minutes' get slammed? Is that how you see our job? Or is it OK to profile a superstar athlete even if we didn't uncover any dirt?" Fagin and his associates didn't have to dig up any dirt. They simply could have asked Woods about the predatory and anti-First Amendment lawsuit he visited sports artist Rick Rush a few years ago.

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The New York Times redesigns its site

The New York Times has redesigned its web site, a move that is likely to draw plenty of attention and comment. There seems to be little new or innovative about the design. It gives the site a cleaner look because of its increased use of white space. What is most disappointing, however, is that the Times has clung to the old-school thinking of maintaining a "multimedia" section. The Times does excellent graphics, videos, slideshows and audio slideshows. Those items should be integrated with the other reporting that the Times does -- if for no other reason than to make things convenient for the reader. Whatever multimedia means to the reader -- and it's not at all clear -- these reporting methods should not be something separate, and it's time for journalists to shed that kind of thinking.

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