Beyond News

The Future of Journalism

Mitchell Stephens

• Verlag: Columbia University Press
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231536295
• Thema: Business
• Thema: Media & Communications Industry

For a century and a half, journalists made a good business out of selling the latest news or selling ads next to that news. Now that news pours out of the Internet and our mobile devices—fast, abundant, and mostly free—that era is ending. Our best journalists, Mitchell Stephens argues, instead must offer original, challenging perspectives—not just slightly more thorough accounts of widely reported events. His book proposes a new standard: "wisdom journalism," an amalgam of the more rarified forms of reporting—exclusive, enterprising, investigative—and informed, insightful, interpretive, explanatory, even opinionated takes on current events.

This book features an original, sometimes critical examination of contemporary journalism, both on- and offline, and it finds inspiration for a more ambitious and effective understanding of journalism in examples from twenty-first-century articles and blogs, as well as in a selection of outstanding twentieth-century journalism and Benjamin Franklin's eighteenth-century writings. Most attempts to deal with journalism's current crisis emphasize technology. Stephens emphasizes mindsets and the need to rethink what journalism has been and might become.

1

“PRINCIPLES, OPINIONS, SENTIMENTS, AND AFFECTIONS”

The Journalism Out of Which the United States Was Born

Perhaps because journalists are so focused on the here and now, they tend to avail themselves less of the lessons of their forbearers than do presidents, say, or painters. But if in their current crisis they were disposed to consult history, our journalists might discover that “experienced reporters going places” was not always considered to be at the heart of American journalism.

Bill Keller insists that this kind of “quality journalism” provides “the information you need to be an engaged citizen.”¹ The founders of this country certainly did agree that the citizenry requires a free press. “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in an oft-quoted but still grand line from a 1787 letter, “I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”²

Jefferson spoke in that letter of the importance of giving the people “full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers.” But it is hard to see how, for Jefferson as for Keller, supplying that information might have involved reporters “bearing witness, digging into records, developing sources, checking and double-checking.”³ For in Jefferson’s America, in James Madison’s America, in Benjamin Franklin’s America, there weren’t any reporters.⁴

All the world’s newspapers today can trace their ancestry, if you look back far enough, to Europe. And the earliest printed newspapers in Europe, which appeared in the first decades of the seventeenth century, were mostly collections of short, paragraph-length news items.⁵ The oldest surviving weekly newssheet written in English and distributed in London was printed (in freer and more precocious Amsterdam) on December 2, 1620. Its first item concerned Bethlen Gábor, who led a revolt against Habsburg rule in Hungary—an early battle in the Thirty Years War. The style of this item is typical of the genre:

Out of Weenen, the 6 November

The French Ambassadour hath caused the Earle of Dampier to be buried stately at Presburg. In the meane vvile hath Bethlem Gabor cited all the Hungerish States, to com together at Presburg the 5. of this present, to discourse aboute the Crovvning & other causes concerning the fame Kingdom.⁶

According to Carlota Smith’s linguistic analysis of “modes of discourse,” this article qualifies, as would most such early newspaper items, as a “report.” It doesn’t—to oversimplify her multifaceted analysis—advance in temporal sequence as a “narrative” might. Time is not “static,” as in a “description.” The item’s account is not general and atemporal, as is an “information.” Instead, specific “situations are related to the time of the report”—“this present,” “the 6 November.” And, of most significance for our purposes, this item is not making a “claim” or “comment,” as an “argument” might. It is not composed of “propositions” as an argument would be.⁷

I don’t want to lean too heavily on these categories—or on the others it will prove interesting to trot out in succeeding pages. Despite the linguists’ best efforts at precision, reports, narratives, descriptions, informations, and even arguments do have a way of blending into each other. Human language resists categorization. When Bill Keller or Jill Abramson are talking about journalism, they certainly do not mean to exclude narrative, description, or information. Yet they are usually talking of kinds of discourse that are most comfortably designated “reports.” So it is significant to see a report atop the first English-language newspaper.

But it is also important to note that this first English-language newspaper report is not the product of behaviors Keller or Abramson might recognize as reporting. Because such newssheets were too slow to keep up with local news and too cautious, given the danger of annoying the authorities, to cover national news, these earliest European printed newspapers discussed almost exclusively events that had taken place in other countries. (Major events in London may have been discussed in letters out of London and therefore may have appeared in newspapers all across Europe, with one copying the other, but they normally did not appear in newspapers in London.)

The short items from afar that filled the columns of these early printed newssheets arrived almost exclusively via the mail or via other newspapers. Indeed, at the very top of page one of that first newspaper published in English—which makes do without a name—is a telling apology: “The new tydings out of Italie are not yet com.” There is no evidence that those who produced such newspapers made significant efforts to seek out “tydings” on their own. They waited for them to “com.” News of that burial and assembly in Pressburg (now Bratislava), which appears right after that apology, must have arrived in a letter or newssheet originally from Vienna, perhaps having passed through some other letters or newssheets along the way.

America gained its first regularly published newspaper, the Boston News-Letter, in 1704. Back in England by that time, those short bits of foreign news were being supplemented and even nudged aside by disquisitions—on contemporary manners and mores, on society, on literature, on philosophy, on religion, or on politics, even British politics. The first issue of the News-Letter, for example, borrowed from a London paper a summary of a “letter” warning of a “danger” to “the Protestant Religion” because Catholics had begun to “swarm” in Scotland.⁸ Most of these longer, more pointed writings Carlota Smith would label “arguments.”

This change is a fateful one, according to the German political philosopher Jürgen Habermas. In the eighteenth century, he observes, the newspaper became—in “bourgeois” societies, with “liberal” politics—“no longer a mere organ for the spreading of news.” Habermas quotes the German economist and early journalism scholar Karl Bücher: “‘Newspapers changed from mere institutions for the publication of news into bearers and leaders of public opinion.’ ” For Habermas, the consequence of this vigorous circulation of opinion—even though it might upon occasion descend to warnings about swarming Catholics—was nothing less than the creation of his treasured “public sphere.”⁹

We can watch this sphere expand in 1721 in Boston, where a debate broke out about the merits of smallpox inoculation. That debate—and therefore this nascent public sphere—was very much aided and abetted by the arrival of Boston’s third and America’s fourth regularly published newspaper. For in its initial issue, James Franklin’s New-England Courant launched what probably qualifies as America’s first anti-authoritarian newspaper crusade on this new strategy for protecting against smallpox.¹⁰

The unsuccessful prosecution of John Peter Zenger fourteen years later for publishing criticism of the governor of New York would open the door to more such newspaper crusades in Britain’s American colonies. Indeed, America in the decades leading up to its revolution is, perhaps, the textbook example of the power of an opinion-wielding press not just in toppling a system of authority, but in creating a space for public discourse and therefore for democracy. Let the record show, however, that James Franklin’s New-England Courant—among the earliest megaphones in this world-changing effort to allow a public to be heard—was crusading against what it called “the dubious, dangerous Practice of Inoculation.”¹¹

Benjamin Franklin was working as an apprentice on his much older brother’s newspaper. Soon he himself began contributing to this still relatively new phenomenon: the public discussion of issues in print. Sixteen-year-old Ben Franklin, writing under the name “Silence Dogood” and in the voice of a rural widow, began sneaking essays into the New-England Courant. Here is “Mrs. Dogood” attacking something young Ben was making do without: higher education (that is, Harvard):

I reflected in my Mind on the extream Folly of those Parents, who, blind to their Childrens Dulness, and insensible of the Solidity of their Skulls, because they think their Purses can afford it, will needs send them to the Temple of Learning, where, for want of a suitable Genius, they learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely, and enter a Room genteely, (which might as well be acquir’d at a Dancing-School,) and from whence they return, after Abundance of Trouble and Charge, as great Blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited.¹²

Although the debate over a college education was not a matter of life and death like the debate over smallpox inoculation, it was no doubt a matter of public concern. And this apprentice printer was helping open space for discussion of such concerns. He accomplished this, as aspiring “bearers and leaders of public opinion” usually do, by expressing and defending an opinion—in his case, with characteristic humor. Ben Franklin, to return to Carlota Smith’s categories, had composed an “argument”—replete with claims, comments, propositions.

Smith has a formula, too, for determining whether a particular discourse qualifies as “subjective,” a different distinction in her view than that between argument and report. She looks for evidence that it presents a “perspective,” performs an “evaluation,” or shares the “contents of [a] mind.” Smith is alert to the fact that such subjectivity can be found in all her “modes of discourse”¹³—presumably including upon occasion even those brief reports that more discursive arguments were beginning to overshadow in colonial America’s press. A positive perspective on or evaluation of the anti-Catholic Hungarian leader Bethlen Gábor can, for example, be discerned even in that fifty-five word report that led off the first English-language newspaper—sold in Protestant England, printed in Protestant Amsterdam.

Nevertheless, Smith’s indicators of subjectivity run thick in Franklin’s argument against higher education—“I reflected in my Mind on the extream Folly”—as they run thick in his brother James’s paper in general and in arguments in general. The public sphere in eighteenth-century America was being established by unabashedly subjective arguments.

Benjamin Franklin’s Silence Dogood letters borrowed some of their style from Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, who had commented on the behavior of their contemporaries with subtle wit and sharp insights earlier in the century in their London daily the Spectator.¹⁴

Collections of the Spectator were prized in Britain’s American colonies; young Franklin had secured one. And he had begun disassembling Addison and Steele’s prose: jotting down the points made by each sentence, putting those sentences aside for a few days, then trying to re-create their wordings. “By comparing my work afterwards with the original,” Franklin writes in his Autobiography, “I discovered many faults and corrected them; but sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that in certain particulars of small import I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language.”¹⁵

Franklin, in other words, had not trained himself for newspaper work by showing up at local fires or meetings, notebook in hand, and distilling out the who, what, when, and where. That was not considered newspaper work in America in the eighteenth century. He had learned the printer’s trade, but Ben Franklin also trained himself by learning how to write clearly, cleverly, attractively, and insightfully by studying the work of the essayists Addison and S...