Bob Stepno: Bob's AEJMC Newspaper Division Blog

This blog is now a Web cobweb

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 05:11:57 GMT

As indicated in the previous post, for seven years this blog was hosted at radio.weblogs.com, which is being discontinued. So I am posting an archive of all the site's files, going back to 2002, in this subsection of stepno.com.

The conversion to the new site is not perfect. For one thing, there was no way to preserve reader comments on the site, including some good conversations. I'm sorry about that.

If you encounter non-functioning links, look for their contents at the corresponding address on this new server. For example, the page formerly at http://www.stepno.com/oldblog/2007/01/14.html
now should be at http://www.stepno.com/oldblog/2007/01/14.html

For my more recent blog entries, see http://stepno.com/blog

Summer reading: The save-journalism and save-newspapers debate

Sun, 31 May 2009 05:30:20 GMT

For summer catch-up reading: A collection of news and blog pieces on the "future of news" and "newspaper bailout" debates and related issues...

Don't let the title fool you... There's inspiration and a hint of optimism in Barbara Ehrenreich 2009 commencement address at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism: Welcome to a dying industry, journalism grads

Next, from Jane Singer, in an AEJMC discussion of the future of journalism & mass communication: one blue-sky scenario of how the not-too-distant future might look for our graduates. (Updated link & info: Since my original post, Jane's essay has won an AEJMC prize.)

Senate hears a dim forecast for newspapers' future by Andrew Miga, AP, via Google

Save the separation of press and state, by David Carr, NY Times

In Congress, no love lost for newspapers, Dana Milbank column in Washington Post

Laws That Could Save Journalism by Bruce W. Sanford and Bruce D. Brown in The Washington Post

"A Newspaper Bailout" by Adam Ross in the Post back in February, describing President Nicholas Sarkozy's plan to aid the French press.

They Pay for Cable, Music and Extra Bags. How about News? by Richard Perez-Pena and Tim Arango, NYTimes.

Sen. John Kerry's opening remarks as chairman of Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet's hearing on "The Future of Journalism." Also from hearing, Arianna Huffington's testimony.

Video and transcripts from the "Free Press Summit" sponsored by the Knight Foundation.

Duke University's non-profit media conference, including Penelope Muse Abernathy's paper, "A Nonprofit Model for The New York Times?" -- which inspired this follow-up in the New Yorker. And more about the conference at The Nonprofit Road.

"Life after newspapers," by Michael Kinsley.

"The American Press on Suicide Watch," by Frank Rich.

"State of the News Media 2009" C-Span interview with Tom Rosentiel, on annual report of the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism

"Do newspapers matter?" from the NYTimes economix blog, citing a Princeton study of the impact of the closing of The Cincinnati Post.

Meanwhile, see The newspaper crisis discussed at Princeton event, from NewJerseyNewsroom.com, a site founded when a bunch of journalists got together at a public library and decided to "create a news site -- unlike any other -- to address the growing journalism void."

"Clinging to a dead business model for dear life" and "The Biggest Threat to Newspapers is Newspapers" by Daily Kos

Scott Rosenberg, "How charging for articles could hobble the future of journalism."

"First, stop the lawyers," by Jeff Jarvis, Buzz Machine.

From the archives:

from "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" by Clay Shirky

"For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need."

from The Elite Newspaper of the Future by Philip Meyer, last fall in American Journalism Review.

The now-emeritus UNC professor suggests it's o.k. for newspapers to give up on "selling everything to everybody." Instead, he says they should focus on being trusted, responsible sources of evidence-based public affairs news and analysis, aimed at what the sociologists call "opinion leaders" -- what Phil calls "well-educated news junkies."

"The newspapers that survive will probably do so with some kind of hybrid content: analysis, interpretation and investigative reporting in a print product that appears less than daily, combined with constant updating and reader interaction on the Web."

Soviet spy story footnotes chapter in 'best blogger' bio

Wed, 20 May 2009 20:21:41 GMT

In "Say It Ain't So, Izzy," the New Haven Independent's Paul Bass reviews a recent controversy over investigative journalist I. F. Stone's contacts with the Soviet Union... back when there was one. Apparently, Stone was someone the Soviet KGB talked to often enough in the 1930s to have a code name for him.

Bass's lead: "I.F. Stone, writer of truth to power, hero to generations of independent journalists... and Soviet agent?" The tale starts with a new Yale University Press book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, particularly a handful of pages about Stone, whose career Paul sums up neatly:

Few survivors of the great 20th century political wars have remained as revered as Stone. He was a dogged reporter, a culler of public documents, a courageous defier of McCarthyism. He wrote passionate editorials for the once-liberal New York Post. He was a mainstay of the great newspaper experiment of the century, PM. When McCarthy's crowd drove many liberal writers out of business or underground, Stone refused to buckle. He published his own sheet, I.F. Stone's Weekly. It became a legend that continues to inspire independent journalists, and now bloggers.

Bloggers? In fact, Dan Froomkin at Harvard's Nieman Foundation has called Stone the best blogger ever, even though Stone died a decade before the first blogs were blogged. See Froomkin's review of a different book All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson. Also, here's an excerpt from that book: The importance of being Izzy and the death of dissent in journalism.

Marking the 2007 centennial of Stone's birth, Harvard's Nieman Foundation launched an I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, presenting the first one last October. I don't see anything on the Harvard site about a 2009 award, or responding to the Yale Press book about what Stone did or didn't say to KGB spies 70 years ago. I hope this doesn't turn into some kind of Yale-Harvard game, but if it does get people reading, thinking and talking, that's OK too.

Until I've read more, I'll agree with Eric Alterman's Daily Beast characterization to Stone's activities in the 1930s:

"A man of avowed anti-Fascist sympathies, still-foolishly naïve about Stalin and the Soviet Union, agreed on a couple of occasions to help those whom he believed to be actually fighting fascism, while his own country, still mired in childish isolationism, looked away."

I.F. Stone led a long and productive life as a journalist, never disguised his left-leaning political sympathies, and inspired a generation of reporters to dig into public records, look for facts and contradictions, maintain their independence, and speak their minds. It would have been wonderful if he had also written an "apologia" for whatever dealings he had with the Soviets before World War II, or for not thoroughly denouncing the Soviet system before the mid-fifties, but I think his career is transparent enough. As the site for his (downloadable) collected writings says, "Izzy Stone was a reporter, a radical, an idealist, a scholar and, it is clear, a writer whose insights have more than stood the test of time." For even more his work, the entire run of I.F. Stone's Weekly is now online at http://www.ifstone.org