The Elements of Journalism, Revised and Updated 3rd Edition: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect - Softcover

Kovach, Bill; Rosenstiel, Tom

 
9780804136785: The Elements of Journalism, Revised and Updated 3rd Edition: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0804136785 ISBN 13: 9780804136785
Verlag: Crown, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Revised and updated with a new preface and material on the rise of social media, the challenges facing printed news, and how journalism can fulfill its purpose in the digital age.
 
Seventeen years ago, the Committee of Concerned Journalists gathered some of America’s most influential newspeople to ask the question, “What is journalism for?” Through exhaustive research, surveys, interviews, and public forums, they identified the essential elements that define journalism and its role in our society. The result is this, one of the most important books on the media ever written, and winner of the Goldsmith Book Award from Harvard, the Society of Professional Journalists award, and the Bart Richards Award from Penn State University.
 
Updated with new material covering the rise of social media, sponsored content, a new, collaborative web-based journalism in which anyone—professional or citizen—can produce news, and much more, this third edition of The Elements of Journalism is an essential read for journalists, students, and anyone hoping to stay informed in the digital age.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bill Kovach was editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Washington bureau chief for the New York Times and curator of the Nieman Journalism Fellowship program at Harvard. He was founding chairman of The Committee of Concerned Journalists.
 
Tom Rosenstiel is executive director of the American Press Institute, founder of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a former media critic for the Los Angeles Times, and chief congressional correspondent for Newsweek. He and Kovach have written two other books together.

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Excerpted from Chapter 1

What Is Journalism For?

On a gray December morning in 1981, Anna Semborska woke up and flipped on the radio to hear her favorite program, Sixty Minutes Per Hour. Semborska, who was seventeen, loved the way the comedy revue pushed the boundaries of what people in Poland could say out loud. Though it had been on the air for some years, with the rise of the labor union Solidarity, 60MPH had become much more bold. Sketches like one about a dim-witted Communist doctor looking vainly to find a cure for extremism were an inspiration to Anna and her teenage friends in Warsaw. The program showed her that other people felt about the world the way she did, but had never dared express. "We felt that if things like these can be said on the radio then we are free," she would remember nearly twenty years later. (1)

But when Anna ran to the radio to tune in the show on December 13, 1981, she heard only static. She tried another station, then another. Nothing. She tried to call a friend and found no dial tone. Her mother called her to the window. Tanks were rolling by. The Polish military government had declared martial law, outlawed Solidarity, and put the clamps back on the media and on speech. The Polish experiment with liberalization was over.

Within hours, Anna and her friends began to hear stories that suggested something this time was different. In a little town called 'Swidnik near the Czech border, there were the dogwalkers. Every night at 7:30, when the state-run television news came on, nearly everyone in 'Swidnik went out and walked his dog in a little park in the center of town.

It became a daily silent act of protest and solidarity. We refuse to watch. We reject your version of truth.

In Gdansk, there were the black TV screens. People there began moving their television sets to the windows-with the screens pointed out to the street. They were sending a sign to one another, and the government. We, too, refuse to watch. We also reject your version of truth.

An underground press began to grow, on ancient hand-crank equipment. People began carrying video cameras and making private documentaries, which they showed secretly in church basements. Soon, Poland's leaders acknowledged they were facing a new phenomenon, something they had to go west to name. It was the rise of Polish public opinion. In 1983, the government created the first of several institutes to study it. It mostly conducted public opinion surveys. Others would sprout up throughout Eastern Europe as well. This new phenomenon was something totalitarian officials could not dictate. At best, they could try to understand it and then manipulate it, not unlike Western democratic politicians. They would not succeed.

Afterward, leaders of the movement toward freedom would look back and think the end of Communism owed a good deal to the coming of new information technology and the effect it had on human souls. In the winter of 1989, the man who shortly would be elected Poland's new president visited with journalists in Washington. "Is it possible for a new Stalin to appear today who could murder people?" Lech Walesa asked rhetorically. No, he answered himself. In the age of computers, satellites, faxes, VCRs, "it's impossible." Technology now made information available to too many people, too quickly. And information created democracy. (2)

What is journalism for?

For the Poles and others in emerging democracies the question was answered with action. Journalism was for building community. Journalism was for citizenship. Journalism was for democracy. Millions of people, empowered by a free flow of information, became directly involved in creating a new government and new rules for the political, social, and economic life of their country. Is that always journalism's purpose? Or was that true for one moment, in one place?

In the United States for the last half century or so the question "What is journalism for?" has rarely been asked, by citizens or journalists. You owned a printing press or a broadcasting license and you produced journalism. In the United States journalism has been reduced to a simple tautology: It was whatever journalists said it was. As Maxwell King, the former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, has said, "We let our work speak for itself." Or, when pressed, journalists take it as a given that they work in the public interest. (3)

This simplistic answer is no longer sufficient — if it ever really was to an increasingly skeptical public. Not now that the new communications technology with which anyone with a modem and a computer can claim to be "doing journalism." Not now that the technology has created a new economic organization of journalism in which the norms of journalism are being pulled and redefined, and sometimes abandoned.

Perhaps, some suggest, the definition of journalism has been exploded by technology, so now anything is seen as journalism.

But on closer examination, as the people of Poland demonstrated, the purpose of journalism is not defined by technology, or by journalists or the techniques they employ. As we will show, the principles and purpose of journalism are defined by something more basic — the function news plays in the lives of people.

For all that the face of journalism has changed, indeed, its purpose has remained remarkably constant, if not always well served, since the notion of "a press" first evolved more than three hundred years ago. And for all that the speed, techniques, and character of news delivery have changed, there already exists a clear theory and philosophy of journalism that flows out of the function of news.

The primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing.

As we listened to citizens and journalists, we heard that this obligation to citizens encompasses several elements. The news media help us define our communities, and help us create a common language and common knowledge rooted in reality. Journalism also helps identify a community's goals, heroes, and villains. "I've felt strongly for a long time that we proceed best as a society if we have a common base of information," NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw told our academic research partners. (4) The news media serve as a watchdog, push people beyond complacency, and offer a voice to the forgotten. "I want to give voices to people who need the voice . . . people who are powerless," said Yuen Tying Chan, a former reporter for the New York Daily News who has created a journalism training program in Hong Kong.5 James Carey, one of the founders of our committee, has put it this way in his own writing: Perhaps in the end journalism simply means carrying on and amplifying the conversation of people themselves. (6)

This definition has held so consistent through history, and proven so deeply ingrained in the thinking of those who produce news through the ages, that it is in little doubt. It is difficult, in looking back, even to separate the concept of journalism from the concept of creating community and later democracy. Journalism is so fundamental to that purpose that, as we will see, societies that want to suppress freedom must first suppress the press. They do not, interestingly, have to suppress capitalism. At its best, as we will also show, journalism reflects a subtle understanding of how citizens behave, an understanding that we call the Theory of the Interlocking Public.

Yet the longstanding theory and purpose of journalism are being challenged today in ways not seen before, at least in the United States. Technology is shaping a new economic organization of information companies, which is subsuming journalism inside it. The threat is no...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804136785
ISBN 13 
9780804136785
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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