My Final Blog

Question # 1 Objectivity

When discussing journalism, objectivity is often the subject of complaint. Everyone seems to be pointing a finger. Fox is too conservative, CNN is too liberal. Politicians don’t seem to help when they claim the media is out to get them. The gotcha conniving media, is what politicians claim when they are portrayed in an un-pleasing light.

So who can be believed? Is anyone being objective theses days?

In some cases, objectivity is being exchanged for money. With both the left and right claming biases because of the loss of objectivity, it becomes more apparent that people hear what they want to, no matter what the content. So now, news organizations, such as Fox, decided to just give people what they wanted. Now they are making great profits catering to a conservative white male audience.

The real problem comes in their level of transparency. Fox, for example, broadcasts under a banner that proclaims they are “fair and balanced.” Opinion, I think, has leaped farther and farther from the editorial page, and now finds its way into un-labeled and non transparent articles and broadcasts. If someone wants to lean one way, I don’t see a problem if they are open and upfront about it.

With most of the opinions on objectivity being centered on political views, I am worried the lack of a pursuit of objectivity could leak into all sectors of what the news is reporting. A journalist should have the ability to honestly cover a given story. Someone who is connected by family or friendship to a story should have enough sense of objectivity to give the story to someone else. If a reporter has financial obligations, or benefits from a story, again they could never be free to cover the story in an objective manner. If scenarios such as these ever did begin to happen, it would not be long until public trust and opinion worsened an already bad state of our news media system.

A journalist, at the end of the day, is human and will have their own opinions and feelings on different issues and people. However, with some standards, I believe all of these opinions can be put aside, and a practiced, professional journalist can tell both sides of a story without telling the reader who is right or what is wrong.

Other journalists who are exceptionally passionate, and wish to tell the world a story through their own eyes, do have a place. The important thing is that those who choose to pursue such avenues, are open and transparent with what they are doing.

As I speculate about my own future career decisions as a journalist, I hope I can be objective in order to provide fair and accurate news stories to an open minded public. I know I have biases and my own opinions, but unless I am offered an appropriate avenue to share them, they will be kept to my self. I think that will include keeping my personal political views or votes to my self so that I don’t give an ever wearier public a reason to distrust another journalist.

Question # 2 Excellence In Journalism

Excellence in journalism is defined by what it does for the people. Journalism and a free press are essential to democracy. The news is traditionally a watch dog for the public. They keep congress and politicians under a scrutinizing light and make sure corrupt businesses are kept in check.

Independence is the keystone to this excellence. Not only does the Journalist need to be independent from the story in order to cover it objectively, but likewise, the news organization as a whole must stay independent in order to uphold what is essential for the public. The founding fathers had this independence in mind, I believe, when they outlined the rights of free speech and press. If the government owned or controlled the press, then the press could never turn around and freely report on the government. We have already seen cases of this happening: for example, a newspaper reporting on the negative aspects of Ford cars while having to worry about their needed income from Ford advertisers.

The ability to examine and ask questions also remains essential for excellence in journalism. Through such reporting, the news becomes a public advocate for the outspoken or even minority voice. Public vigilance towards issues that are affecting everyone or just a few people, can receive needed attention through the public discussion and awareness a news story can bring about.

As I read and followed the Idaho Statesman, my hometown newspaper, I noticed several things. Little attention was given to national news, and instead, local issues made the front page of their newspaper and website. Often, they featured articles about local civic leaders, or local groups fighting for and against problems that were important to people living in their area. I think the Idaho Statesman knows they are not a national, public opinion driving newspaper. They are read by the people living in south west Idaho and therefore, stick to the issues not only important to their audience, such as football at Boise State, but also help hold up that areas own democratic processes.

Question # 3 Journalistic Truth

I honestly do not remember discussing journalistic truth much in class, so most of my thoughts come from reading chapter 4 of The Big Picture.

The argument of truth seems to me more of a philosophical discussion, rather than a journalistic one. Yes, truth in the end, I will admit, is relative to the speaker and receiver. What the truth is can depend on our perspective, which rarely, if ever, is the same between two people.

I believe society decides the starting points of truth. There are expectations and norms long since established that I believe the news works with. People who are aware of their surroundings, and society as a whole, know the general perspectives that the news reports with. If this was not the case the news might be filled with hours of arguing what was really seen or said, and what it means in the end.

Some basic concepts of truth are accepted by the Journalists and the consumer, and for me that creates the groundwork for creating societal and civic knowledge.

Question # 4 Where Is the News Going?

Over the last several months the News networks of print and broadcast have seen a glimmer of hope, and have had further devastating blows dealt by a global economic melt down.

Through out this semester I was very interested in what was going on with newspapers, and where they were going. It seemed all the news was depressing, layoffs, downsizing, and sliding confidence from the public. The glimmer of hope was from the presidential election fervor. People were watching the news more. Even young people were tuning in to the more traditional news sources it seemed. The real victory, especially for the newspaper world, came on the day after Obama’s win. Newspapers had record sales with papers selling out in many places, and special over priced editions selling like hotcakes. Yes people were buying the papers for the historical significance, but I felt like it was newspapers time to show they were still worth something and still an important profitable product.

Unfortunately, it does not seem as though that was accomplished. The Tribune Company, which publishes the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, filed for bankruptcy. So it might turn out Newspapers did not seize the opportunity of increased popularity as I had hoped.

In all fairness it is not the complete fault of news organizations. With the economy in gloomy times it has really been a two edged sword for newspapers and broadcast companies alike. For starters people pay more attention to the news when there are attention grabbing headlines like stock market crashes and giant financial collapses. On the other hand the bad economy affects newspapers through several ways. One, many newspapers are publicly owned and a bad stock market means bad news for those newspapers and an ever pressing expectation on the newspapers to increase their profits. Two, less advertising dollars because of a decline in add spending means a big chunk of revenue gone. Third, giant companies who also own news groups can’t spend as much money on the news so their solution is downsizing and layoffs for the news rooms.

Maybe the final blow came once everyone started to realize there is not a lot of money to be made from internet content. Over the past several years many decided to run as fast as they could to make their content available on the internet. To their credit many have done this, and done it well. However, where is the money in it? With disappointing add revenue from their internet sites even more newspapers are folding.

The scary part about all this is the stress and strain it places upon the journalists. Now a poorly paid crew of even fewer reporters are expected to accomplish what before took huge budgets and many more people. This causes not only less quality in the writing and reporting, but even the size and page count of the paper itself is decreasing. Most frightening though is what this means for our press as a public advocate and watch dog. If there is only one journalist keeping tabs on things that used to take 10 a lot more can slip by. A perfect example of this is the fact there is only one full time American journalist stationed in Iraq. What more could be reported and uncovered if news organizations were not being forced to be make cuts.

Obviously this also means a bleak outlook for my own future. In 5 or 10 even 20 years from now it is hard to say exactly what will happen. TV news, I believe, has many years until significant changes will be made, but newspapers will not last much longer. If I had to guess newspapers will consolidate and die off until only several larger ones remain. Perhaps even instead of newspapers gathering the news individually I could see the creation of journalists groups such as the AP network who will do all of the reporting, investigating and writing. Then these groups will sell the stories to the news outlets. This would be unfortunate and would make decent local reporting even harder to finance.

In the end my outlook remains positive. I think the need for journalists with good writing skills will always exist. Although how we view and report the news is changing at an accelerated rate the need will always be there for the public to be informed.

Just an added note I did not discuss the internet i.e. blogs and twitter a lot, but at the end of the day these online forums will never become the main news source for the general public. They will though, help the people who are reporting the news get more first hand and in-depth accounts of unfolding stories.

Question # 5 My Own Personal Code

When I have contemplated my future career I decided long ago that if I was going to spend the better part of my life doing my job that it needed to be worth more than just money. The more I learned about what journalism really is, the more I knew journalism has far reaching and significant affects on our society. My bumper sticker read a voice for the people and a voice for democracy. I believe journalism at its best does these two things. By giving first the people a voice public discussion and thought can be initiated. People can be empowered by the knowledge true news brings. With this empowerment of knowledge educated people can turn the wheels of democracy that our country is founded on.

Even in countries outside of our own journalists wage the war of independent thought and government accountability. We are blessed in this country to have the protection to print and say the truth. The more I think of my own chance to participate in something so great and bigger than myself the more excited I am.

As a journalist my own personal code would be to uphold and further this great journalistic legacy. I would hope I can accurately and objectively as far as it is possible present stories of our society to the public at large. If and when my opinion would be warranted I will be transparent and label it as such.

Hopefully what ever content I produce under the title of a “journalist” I will be sure to not do or say anything that would tarnish my own reputation, but even more importantly tarnish the reputation of journalists everywhere.

Citations

My thoughts and writings for this final have been based off of class discussions, personal thoughts, and current events I have discussed in my own class blog; with the exception of question three when I used some ideas from chapter 4 in the Big Picture book.

Twitter

So I have been thinking about twitter and what it means to journalism and news and as I did so a discussion from my history class popped into my head.

This discussion was about the worth of first hand accounts to learn about history events. The class debated about how these first hand accounts contained biases, and although enlightening and interesting a true student of history could not rely on one first hand account alone in order to understand the picture as a whole.

It seems to me that each twitter post although invaluable to developing a fuller story is just describing one a single tree. With apparent limitations, such as a 140 word count limit, mini bloging sites such as twitter make it impossible to fully describe a whole forest.

Most recently Twitter was pushed into the spot light with articles such as “Citizen Journalists Provided Glimpses of Mumbai Attacks” published by the New York Times. As this article hints in the title, many got glimpses into the horrific attacks because of twitter posts.

Perhaps the most important question is how is all of this affecting journalism in general and our traditional news media? With reports saying that Twitter was receiving more than one post a second with the words Mumbai in them, that’s more than 3,000 posts in an hour, who really has the ability to take all of that in and cohesively weave the facts together to paint a bigger picture.

Yes Twitter is becoming in-valuable, but to who? I am going to guess in large it is not valuable to the average person who wants a quick and accurate account of what is going on for any given news day.

With that in mind I am going to have to say that these blog sites are truly valuable to a true journalist or news organization that has the time and resources to analyze and use them.

Back to my discussion in my history class it was pointed out that it is the traditional history book that is able to take all the historical fist hand accounts and boil them down into something that can be easily understood for a beginning level history class.

Like wise it is our newspapers, TV, and Radio stations who are using the first hand insightful tweets to present a well understood story of what is happening.

Blogs and tweets will not make traditional news media obsolete, but it will enhance their ability to accurately unfold important news at record speeds.

Turkeys and Journalism

As I thought about what to write for this blog I came across three articles that reminded me of the importance of journalism and its far reaching impact on society and the journalists themselves.

The first article I read was entitled Media coverage can impact financial markets, journalists say. The title tells it all. Journalists I feel have a responsibility to know the power the news has and unfortunately in some places the consequences can be more than financial.

The second article was the news of a grenade attack on a Mexican newspaper office, and as I scrolled through the related articles one read simply Another journalist murdered in Mexico. It seems the many criminals in Mexico do not like the attention brought by the journalists and newspapers.

However, even with these dangers, and other journalists being jailed or killed the world over, they continue to report what is important for others to hear.

On a lighter note apparently we can thank a journalist for our upcoming thanks giving break

According to the Science News website in the article Thank Journalist, Rather Than Pilgrims, For Thanksgiving Feast, “The holiday came about through fifty years of relentless promotion by Sarah Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine. She promoted it in columns and stories in her magazine until President Abraham Lincoln finally bestowed it national recognition.”

Maybe this year I will be thankful for journalism.

Finally some good news

Just in time too. I don’t know about anyone else out there but I was getting a bit depressed and discouraged about the whole business of print journalism. At my core I truly believe and understand the importance of tangible things such as newspapers, but all the doomsday predictions and declining percentages had me really second guessing the future of print journalism.

That was until newspapers sales after election day. People apparently were running out of newspapers as they flew off the stands in record numbers.

As we have talked a lot about biases and other problems facing the coverage of the recent election maybe the publics interest has shown that right or wrong the media as a whole has taped into record breaking audiences.

Whether it was the historic nature of the election, or the way it was covered can be debated. I would like to think it was a combination of the two, what does everyone else think?

TV news enjoyed a record 71.5 million viewers tuning into watch. ABC was at the top of the prime time viewership and CNN, with the aid of some special effects, historically brought in the most viewers overall.



Newspapers also enjoyed a surge of interest increasing output in some cases up 60%.
Here are some quotes, that sum it up better than I can ,from an article titled “A Strange Global Phenomenon Occurred Wednesday – People Were Lining Up To Buy Newspapers, Many Outlets Sold Out, And Additional Press Runs Were The Order Of The Day,” by Philip M. Stone.

Digby Solomon, publisher of the Daily Press, in Newport News, Virginia - “We anticipated some additional demand, but this was an historic election… and (we) completely underestimated it, It shows that when something truly historic takes place, people want a printed record of it.”
But perhaps what newspaper publishers need to remember most – they could do a lot worse than use it as a tagline for an advertising campaign reminding the public that newspapers are published every day, not just the day after Election Day – is what Shirley Holman, 59, of Dallas said: Seeing the news in print "makes it real."

Surely there’s a message there for publishers that if they put out a quality editorial product that its populace is really interested in, then print newspapers do just fine. Sure, the election of a Black man as President of the United States was historic and exceptional, but it goes to show people have not forgotten newspapers, and newspapers need to keep coming out with editorial products that people want to read, even keep.

So for me I am skeptical if Obama will really bring any of the change he promised, but if anything else thanks to him maybe newspapers can use this historical event as a spring board to reestablish the legitimacy with advertisers and naysayers alike.

Maybe if newspapers in the end don’t make it they won’t have anyone to blame except themselves for not putting out a quality product people want and feel is important. That quality I think lies in the hands of the journalists writing, taking the pictures, and helping put the final product together.

How many people does it take to write a newspaper?

“The blogosphere has had its share of news breaks, but absent a functioning mainstream media to annotate, it could be pretty darn quiet out there.” wrote David Carr, in the article Mourning Old Media’s Decline.

In this article he sums up the decline of newspapers, and magazines that has been highlighted most recently by Gannett, who happens to be the nation’s largest newspaper company planning to lay off 10 percent of their newspapers staffers.

Many reasons are given for the decline including the economy and the decline of advertising revenue.

CNNMoney.com invites us to Read all about it...but not in your newspaper, saying “According to figures by PriceWaterhouse Coopers, between 2005 and 2010 the U.S. newspaper industry will go from a $60 billion to a $50 billion industry, as measured by revenue.”

I think 50 billion dollars is still a lot, but apparently not enough to keep things how they were.

Two more quotes from these articles stood out to me.

“Bob Iger, the CEO of Walt Disney, was asked what he thought about the newspaper industry's future. In so many words, he basically said that if the newspaper didn't exist and someone tried to create it, you'd be hard-pressed to dispute the appeal of a product that delivered the world to your doorstep every morning in a smartly-produced package. He then noted, with some relief, that Disney briefly owned newspapers but unloaded them more than a decade ago-largely to Knight Ridder.”

“At the recent American Magazine Conference, one of the speakers worried that if the great brands of journalism — the trusted news sources readers have relied on — were to vanish, then the Web itself would quickly become a “cesspool” of useless information. That kind of hand-wringing is a staple of industry gatherings. But in this case, it wasn’t an old journalism hack lamenting his industry. It was Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google.”

I guess my real question is with all these reporters and newspaper staffers being fired how long will it be until anyone notices the difference in news quality, or has it already happened?

The right, the left, some Russians and O'Reilly

It is certain that many people are interested in the news media and their coverage of the election, and more specifically the candidates. Both sides seem to want to argue that there is a bias for one thing or another. They want to claim agendas for determining what they cover, how they cover it, and how much air time theses issues receive.

James Rainey from the Los Angeles Times said this about these concerns of bias and agenda pushing.

“Such pronouncements, sorry to say, tend to be wrong since they describe a monolithic media that no longer exists. Information today cascades from countless outlets and channels, from the Huffington Post to Politico.com to CBS News and beyond.”

Even though I agree with this outlook many people have taken the time to research the issues of media biases. One of which is the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, who says that ABC, NBC and CBS are more tough on Obama than on John McCain

Other groups seem to find the opposite true. The conservative Media Research Center found after isolating stories on the ABC, NBC and CBS that 42 percent were positive and only 7 percent were negative.

Apparently Russian observers of the election have agreed with the later saying in a preliminary report that after observing ABC, NBC and CBS, Obama has a "hidden advantage."

I think bias and completely fair and balanced news coverage might be impossible to have, especially when as we have discussed in class observers will find what they are looking for.

Can biases be helpful to a journalist as long as they continue to responsibly cover the news?

One person who does not try to hide an obvious bias towards one side is Bill O'Reilly who recently used his biased commentary in order to secure himself a 4 year 40 million dollar contract.

So maybe in the end it seems to me like having an outrageous bias or opinion and being open with it is a great way to earn money while classical thoughts of an unbiased neutral media seem to be a sure fire way to being laid off or down sized.

For 10 million dollars a year what would you say on TV?

Now What?

The New York Times reported this week that online advertising revenue for newspapers has been declining in an article entitled Newspapers’ Web Revenue Is Stalling.

A lot of papers have been expanding their online features to attract and increase add revenue, and they were all betting for big returns.

Unfortunately in the last quarter online add revenue was down 2.4 percent.

To help slumping sales many in the industry struggle to decide whether or not to use add networks to fill up empty add space which would otherwise go unused. Others are limiting their add space and filling it themselves to improve their add revenue and percentages.

According to an article from Bloomberg.com Wachovia Capital Markets and Barclays Capital estimated that add revenue will continue to fall throughout this year and the next.

Some papers are taking drastic measures; the McPherson Sentinel from Kansas has cut out the entire day stopping the print of newspapers for Mondays.

From the same above mentioned Bloomberg article we get this quote from Nancy Conway, editor of MediaNews Group Inc.'s Salt Lake Tribune.

“You have to sort of weigh the service versus the cost, and right now newsprint is very costly…Revenue isn't what it used to be, so we have to make some tough decisions.”

Decisions that, for the Salt Lake Tribune, have meant merging and combining sections of the newspaper.

I feel as add revenue continues to slip down we will see newspapers finding new ways to adapt and cut costs.

Any guess what those will be? Comment what you think.