New Website, Blog site!

I have finally bought a hosting plan and integrated my Web site into an all-in-one with my blog, photos, multimedia, resume … everything.
I will no longer be updating the blog on this site.
Visit my new site at www.katharinelackey.com and click on the “Blog” photo.

The Death of Newspapers and Journalism

“It is now possible to contemplate a time in the near future when major towns will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.” ~ Time’s Walter Isaacson

As Wall Street is seeing bailouts in the hundreds of billions, another important sector in America is being ignored: journalism. In a recent article by The Nation, John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney write extensively about the decline of newspapers and what the government could do about it.

The basis of the pair’s argument for government support of newspapers is basically that as an institution newspapers provide for the continuance of America’s democracy.

“The founders regarded the establishment of a press system, the Fourth Estate, as the first duty of the state. Jefferson and Madison devoted considerable energy to explaining the necessity of the press to a vibrant democracy. The government implemented extraordinary postal subsidies for the distribution of newspapers.”

To prevent this devastating  death of newspapers, Nichols and McChesney believe that an annual tax credit for the first $200 spent on daily newspapers should be instituted.

But that’s just to start us off.

The authors argue that the $450 million spent annually by the government (lower than in most democracies) on public media should be increased to $60 billion, or $20 billion a year for the next three years.

Now, I’m not sure if government support is the way to go — after all it could be a slippery slope — but with fewer and fewer options on the table, I wonder if it should at least be discussed. With the current recession, however, I doubt Congress is going to be ready, willing or able to finance such a large operation, even if there is some economic benefit to be had from keeping journalists out of the unemployment line.

There is, as always, a larger point to this discussion. If newspapers cease to exist, what will happen to journalism? Despite online innovation on the part of newspapers, staffs are still decreasing at a rapid rate — The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is reducing its paper staff of 165 to one of just 20 individuals to run its online operations. Will these smaller staff lead not only to less coverage overall, but more coverage on topics without real public impact (especially entertainment?). If even smaller staffed online ventures prove unprofitable, will corporations abandon the enterprise all together for the sake of profit?

When I think about the end of newspapers I think about the thousands of papers that were published on Election Day and on inauguration day. Around the world, people celebrated and read about the new United States president — Barack Obama. And those same people saved their newspapers. In the U.S., papers flew off the newstands, even selling out in some places.

Thirty years from now, we will go through our attic and we will find those papers, tinted yellow by the passing time. And as we leaf through the pages that are beginning to crumble, we will reminisce about the historical events.

But, I wonder, will we also be reminiscing of the days when newspapers still existed?

Speaking of Twitter’s popularity…

Just caught this in the Associated Press story I was reading to send through copy desk — more proof that Twitter is going mainstream:

Democratic lawmakers promoted a potential plan to help move so-called toxic assets off bank ledgers. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., said discussions were under way, but would not be rushed. “If they wait a week or two more, no one ought to get all in a twitter about that. It’s very important to do it right,” he said.

Now, Mr. Frank doesn’t actually use Twitter himself, but its still good to see that a Congressman knows abiut the social networking site. Maybe he will join TweetCongress.org someday.

Absence

Well I haven’t updated this blog since November…. NOVEMBER! The ridculous-ness of this astounds me — I missed the after effects of Obama’s election, not to mention inauguration day and the first couple months he’s been in office. I missed the climb of Twittering into an acceptable and commonplace social networking site that is beginning to rival Facebook. I missed The Daily Emerald’s strike (though at least that was more recent).

Well, no longer. Though I’ve been and continue to be incredibly busy finishing my final semester at Penn State, I must make this blog a priority.

So to kick it off, here’s my new favorite comic and proof of Twitter’s newfound success:

On a side note: It’s great to know that comics and late-night talk show hosts have not been completely without presidential jokes since Bush left — though the focus has obviously been taken away from the failed Bush policies and his inarticulate-ness, Obama is still fair game for late night.

After all, nobody’s perfect.

Covering Election Day

I went out yesterday with my camera in hand around Penn State, taking photos for my photojournalism class. Here’s what I found:

By far, the most interesting part of the night was when a crowd of students formed, walking around campus in celebration of Barack Obama’s win.  They ended up on the steps of Old Main, where Obama spoke to 22,000 in March.

Capturing the Wall Street crisis

In the past weeks it seems that we’ve been flooded with the inescapable images of Wall Street’s downfall as markets have plunged, and continued to do so despite the passing of a bailout bill.

What surprised me most, was the relative sameness of the photos being published, mostly through The Associated Press — seems some photographers are stalking the floor looking for downtrodden stock brokers… and they’ve found many examples.

Most photos seem to illustrate the feeling on Wall Street by finding stock brokers with their hands covering part or all of their faces.

Here’s a few from the last couple days:

AP Photo

AP Photo

AP Photo

AP Photo

It’s not that I’m against taking photos of stock brokers who are obviously not feeling great about Wall Street at the moment, it’s just that I’d like to see more photos published that focus on how regular people are dealing with the market … like this one:

AP Photo

I have a feeling the problem comes down to limited space for photos — if you can only publish one photo to illustrate the Wall Street crisis, most likely you will pick from the ones with stock brokers.

Speaking of multimedia reporting

For the last couple of weeks, my normally print only reporting class has focused on audio. A couple Mondays ago, we recorded a speech of Victoria Freile, a multimedia reporter for the Democrat & Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y.

Here’s a segment of that speech where Freile discusses being a multimedia reporter and why multimedia is so important.

Still a print journalist at heart

(This post originally appeared on Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists, a blog for young journalists.)

As journalism moves more and more in the direction of multimedia, I find myself torn. It’s not that I don’t like audio or video journalism, or that I’m not at least somewhat capable of producing such multimedia, it’s just that I enjoy traditional print journalism much more, even with what some call a limited capacity for story telling.

So, despite all my work to become a well-rounded multimedia and print journalist, I hope to work mainly as a print reporter in the future, perhaps capturing audio or video to go online for some stories, photos for others.

I enjoy weaving words and creating visual images for the reader’s mind. Whether it’s a story based on a 15-minute conversation or a two-hour-long interview, I try to find that uniqueness that makes a story a story and not just a string of words thrown together. When you move exclusively to audio and video — you lose the ability to shape what you’re reporting on, to tell a story in your own voice.

At the same time, I don’t believe that injecting a reporter into an audio or video production is an option, as that most times produces laughable results — especially with video (unless they know broadcast journalism well).

Audio and video do, however, have the ability to enhance a print story in its online form. In this day and age, no important event should be covered without the basic idea of putting audio soundslides with the story online. And I hope a future job lends me the ability to accomplish that when necessary.

Photos, in and of themselves, also have the ability to tell a story in a visual fashion that can be just as good, if not better, than print reporting alone. Add in audio or music and you get productions such as MediaStorm which tell stories from multiple angles that print journalism alone could not accomplish.

Overall, I think it’s important not to separate multimedia and print — or to have two distinct reporters for each of those categories. Instead, a more streamlined production could be made by having print reporters combine audio, video or photo slides to stories that lend themselves to that type of multimedia.

The focus, though, I hope will remain on the writing.

Vantage Point

Angie Jones: This isn’t the only story here, Rex. The protesters…
Rex Brooks: Which I don’t give a shit about, and unless they set themselves on fire, they’re not our story.

During the movie, Vantage Point, Sigourney Weaver’s character, Rex Brooks, repeatedly points out, “We’re here for the summit, not the sideshow” when her cameraman and anchor try to stray from the approved upon script — a press release-type read on a summit between world leaders — ignoring the protesters who flank all sides of the podium.

As media corporations have continued to merge, forming expansive companies that span multiple media outlets. many have criticized the moves, saying that the combinations are lethal for the American public who are increasingly only seeing one view of the news — despite the multiple vantage points any story can take.

We’ve been discussing this a lot lately in one of my communications theory classes and, recently, we watched part of the documentary Orwell Rolls in His Grave, which spends a lot of time discussing what happens when news comes from only a few media sources.

In the class discussions that followed, the professor talked a lot about the issues mentioned in the film, but tended to emphasize how the creation of professional journalism has created an industry that relies on official sources who provide journalists with pre-written press releases. How non-partisan journalism was created out of a business model because it sells more papers, rather than in a strive to provide viewers and readers with both sides of a story. How budget cuts and decreases in staff size, which have run rampant in recent years, is merely a result of company ownership over media instead of single media enterprises. As a result, foreign bureaus have been cut completely, disallowing journalists from really investigating foreign issues and depriving Americans of knowledge of foreign countries.

From this vantage point, the media conglomerations are viewed as despicable corporations, whose only focus is on the business of making money.

Here’s my problem: There’s a specific reason why journalists rely on official sources. Why journalists try to report in a nonpartisan way. There’s a reason why newspapers have needed to cut back in recent years, including removing foreign bureaus.

To start, official sources are important in an article because they can provide insight into a situation that the ordinary person would otherwise not understand. And any good journalists knows not to rely on a press release, unless under dire circumstances. Indeed, I’ve had many a call where the spokesperson has said, “Well, did you see our press release?” … “Yes, I did, but we don’t go off releases and I have a couple questions that weren’t answered in the press release.” I’m not sure if experts fall into the official source category, but for me, at least, an official source is one that can provide knowledge to a given situation. Joe Schmo down the street, on the other hand, can only provide his musings on the world which are much more likely to be widely inaccurate, skewed, and left or right-leaning.

Which leads to the second point — nonpartisan journalism is utilized, I believe, not as a tool for selling more newspapers (just look at some of the obviously partisan media out there such as Huffington Post or the Daily Kos) but as a way to get both sides of the story. If someone were to read a completely skewed story either to the left or right, would they believe it if they knew nothing else about the situation? Does the credibility of newspapers (although it is waning) make people believe what they read?

Finally, I’m sad to report that, like most other businesses, newspapers and other media need money to stay in production. Sure, it’d be great if we could bypass that need, but unfortunately we can’t. Like any business, newspapers have budgets that rise and fall given supply and demand among other things. As advertising revenue has yet to catch up with print revenue, though, we are hurting. Once those advertising dollars catch up online, though (and they should, eventually), I’m sure we will see fewer layoffs and buyouts. Until then, we’ll just have to rely on The Associated Press for our foreign content.

Now, this isn’t to say that they’re aren’t problems with media conglomerations. I wholeheartedly agree that there are, but my point is that the problems aren’t those that were emphasized during the lecture. The problems aren’t those that were on the PowerPoint I wrote down.

The problems with media conglomerations has to do a lot with vantage points. Not so much when a newspaper company owns several different newspapers spread throughout the country, perhaps with a few television or radio stations thrown in, but when a company with vastly different interests, such as Walt Disney, or General Electric owns major news organizations. When we have to deal with media that has corporation interests to protect, which is why we may not see an indepth report done by NBC on any evils General Electric is hiding. Or why VH1 may stop broadcasting and refer to MTV when the music awards are on.

The companies have the power to shape not only our news, but, in turn, how we view the world.

Banned: Blogging and Twittering

Where do I even start on this one …

Alana Taylor, who I discussed a couple weeks ago for a post she wrote for MediaShift, has been banned from blogging and twittering on the class she remarked on in her post.

Her original post popped up on Romenesko with a line about how she disliked carrying the bulky New York Times to class. The post about her banned status also showed up on the Poynter blog yesterday.

Taylor’s article took a close look at the class she was taking called “Reporting Gen Y,” raising questions about the ability of the class and NYU to prepare students for a future career in journalism, which is increasingly become more and more multimedia-driven.

We won’t be seeing any more posts from Taylor, though, since her professor wasn’t exactly appreciative of the critical look at her teaching and the class.

Let’s start with “Twittering” since that’s a bit easier to dissect.

It’s one thing to ban twittering during class — as it would fall under the distraction clause, but it’s an entirely different thing to ban it after class is over. First of all, you can only say so much in 140 characters and as a social networking site, Twitter is no different than Facebook in that students will moan and complain about classes on the site. Could professors start to follow their students on Twitter to see if they update their status during class and thereby give them a lower grade for participation since they were essentially ‘texting’ in class?

And if this NYU professor is setting a precedent, could students at other schools, especially private ones, be admonished for twittering after class how they hate a class, or a professor? Could they even twitter ‘nice’ things about the class? What about just remarking on the classwork or an exam coming up? What happens when we shift this debate to a public college or high school?

Onto the more sticky point — blogging.

Without students like Taylor blogging about the classes they’re taking in J-school, would we know how bad the situation is? How much J-schools are failing?

Does Taylor’s blog and others like it draw attention from other J-school administrators so that they change the policy of only providing print classes to print journalists and broadcast classes to broadcast students?

If we eliminate all blogging about J-school classes, where will we end up five years from now compared to where we would end up with prolific blogging on J-schools?

Lots of questions and probably few answers we can all agree on.

Some have replied to the newest MediaShift post saying that Taylor was being “sneaky,” that she was going behind her teacher’s back in directly quoting her.

I’ve run into semi-similar situations where I’ve wanted to take something from a class and remark on it. Always worried about upsetting people, I’ve usually just been generic and said “my journalism professor” or “a student in the class.” Even then, I worry that criticizing a professor would have backlashes should that professor find my post.

But should I really have to worry?

I go to Penn State, a public university. We house a First Amendment Center and many knowledgeable journalism professors who understand that students have rights too.

Professors hope their words and teachings will surpass the classroom, remaining with and influencing a student for years to come. What better way to preserve their teachings and spread them to a wider audience than by students blogging about it?