The Elements of Journalism

How do journalists understand their audiences?

1. Asking people how they live their lives 2. Harnessing online metrics 3. Learn how audiences are beginning to consume in new ways

What are the 9 tasks of new journalists?

1. Authenticator: know which facts they have encountered they should believe and which to discount 2. Sense Maker: put events into context in a way that turns information into knowledge 3. Bear Witness: when the journalist is the sole observer of an event 4. Watchdog: role of investigative reporting, uncovering wrongdoing 5. Intelligent Aggregator: picking the best of other accounts 6. Forum Leader: organizing public discussion 7. Empowerer: providing audiences tools and info so they can act for themselves 8. Role Model 9. Community Builder

Techniques of Verification

1. Edit with skepticism 2. Keep an accuracy checklist 3. Assume nothing 4. Tom French's Red Pencil (go through story line by line with red) 5. Be careful with anonymous sources

Spirit of Transparency (Elements of Transparency)

1. First involves the journalist asking for each event, "what does my audience need to know to evaluate this information for itself?" 2. Answering the question: "Is there anything in our treatment of this that requires an explanation? Were any controversial decisions made to leave something in or take something out?" 3. Those who produce news should acknowledge the questions they cannot answer

Rules to the 6th Principle of Journalism: Journalism must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise

1. Forum must be built on truthfulness, facts, and verification 2. Forum must be available to all parts of the community, not just those who are most vocal 3. Forum cannot focus just on the two extremes of a debate. The public forum must include the broad areas of agreement where most of the public resides

Two Questions Reporters have to ask themselves before using an anonymous source

1. How much direct knowledge does the anonymous source have of the event? 2. What motive might the source have for misleading us or hiding imp. facts that might alter our impression of the info?

What are the long term problems with infotainment?

1. If you feed people only trivia and entertainment, you will wither an appetite and expectations of some people for anything else. 2. It destroys the news organization's authority to deliver more serious news and drives away those audiences who want it. 3. The infotainment strategy is faulty as a business plan because when you turn your news into entertainment, you are playing into the strengths of other media rather than your own.

Concepts to think about when deciding how to convey a story

1. Issues or trend 2. Explanatory piece 3. Profile 4. Voices 5. Descriptive 6. Investigative 7. Narrative 8. Visual 9. Data

7 Key Elements of Print

1. Narrative 2. Headline 3. Photo 4. Illustration 5. Graphic table or chart 6. Design elements like pull quotes

Intellectual Principles of a Science of Reporting (Discipline of Verification)

1. Never add anything that was not there originally 2. Never deceive the audience 3. Be as transparent as possible about your methods and motives 4. Rely on your own original reporting 5. Exercise humility

Implications for Objectivity that are crucial to the 21st century understanding of media

1. Objectivity is not the absence of a POV, but the aim of objectivity is a disciplined unity of method transparently conveyed 2. The impartial voice employed by many news organizations is not a fundamental principle of journalism 3. The neutral voice, without a discipline of verification, is often a veneer atop something hollow.

A Citizens Bill of Rights and Responsibilities

1. On truthfulness 2. On loyalty to citizens 3. On independence 4. On monitoring power 5. A public forum 6. On proportionality and engagement

Three Forms of Investigative Reporting

1. Original Investigative Reporting 2. Interpretive Investigative Reporting 3. Reporting on Investigations

What are the pressures to truth?

1. Speed is almost always the enemy of accuracy 2. Growing orientation toward commentary and argument

What test should citizens apply in evaluating what they think of masquerading?

1. The info must be sufficiently vital to the public interest to justify deception 2. Journalists should engage in masquerading only if there is no other way to get the story 3. Journalists should reveal to their audience whenever they mislead sources to get info and explain their reasons for doing so.

5 Keys to a News Company Maintaining Commitment to Citizens

1. The owner must be committed to citizens first 2. Hire business managers who also put citizens first 3. Journalists have final say over the news 4. Set and communicate clear standards internally 5. Communicate clear standards to the public as well

Pressure of Verification

1. The temptation to publish immediately because something can always be corrected later 2. The impulse to publish news simply because it's already "out there" in the new networked media system

Principles of Journalism

1. Truth 2. Loyalty 3. The essence of journalism is a discipline of verification 4. Journalists must maintain an independence from those they cover 5. Journalists must serve as an independent monitor of power 6. Journalism must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise 7. Journalism must make the significant interesting and relevant. 8. Journalism should keep the news comprehensive and in proportion 9. Journalists have an obligation to exercise their personal conscience 10. Citizens, who shape news production by the choices they make, have rights when it comes to the news, but they also have responsibilities-- even more so as they become producers and editors themselves

Journalistic Independence

Allegiance to citizens

4th Estate

American Journalism is the 4th estate or the 4th branch of government; independent monitor of power and monitor of the 3 other branches.

Principle Bias

American people feel that there is a class divide between those who produce the news and those who receive it. That the class divide manifests a class bias toward most Americans. ex: 1% of the population owns 35% of all the commonly traded stock. Not everyone is watching the ticker across the bottom of CNBC

Walter Lippman

American writer and reporter who said mostly know the world only indirectly, through "pictures they make up in their heads." And they receive these mental pictures largely through the media. Their images are hopelessly distorted & incomplete. the public's ability to comprehend the truth even if it happened to come across it was undermined

Who is the author of Elements of Journalism?

Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel

Masquerading

Category of misleading that occurs when journalists pose as someone else to get a story.

Open Journalism

Combines the professionalism of journalists and their access to the observations and knowledge of public witness and experience. Citizens inform journalists.

Gate Keeping in Journalism

Determine and decipher what news we get

Spin

Form of source control when the source tried to manipulate information to suit their purpose. It is not technically lying because it is based on truth. It is the art of altering perspectives.

Disproportionate/Proportionate News

How much time is devoted to a news event. For example disproportionate (or out of proportion) would be given to something like celebrity news.

Granting a Source Anonymity

If a source who has been granted anonymity is found to have deliberately misled the reporter, the source's identity should be revealed. Part of the bargain is that in exchange the source tells the truth.

Opinion Pieces

In opinion pieces the journalist has to have more evidence to back up the opinion.

What diversity is necessary in a newsroom?

Intellectual diversity

What has the tone of journalism changed to in recent years?

Journalism has become more subjective and judgmental rather than simply reporting it. Shifted from the "what" of public life to the "why"

What is the 7th principle of journalism really about?

Journalism is storytelling with a purpose. That purpose is to provide people with information they need to understand the world. The first challenge is finding the info that people need to live their lives. The second is to make it meaningful, relevant, and engaging.

Where is journalism's loyalty to?

Journalism's first loyalty is to its citizens.

What is journalism's first obligation?

Journalism's first obligation is to the truth.

What are some tools for the discipline of verification?

Practices such as seeking mulitiple witnesses to an event, disclosing as much as possible about sources, and asking for many sides for comment

What is the solution to combat insularity?

Recruit more people to journalism from a diversity of classes and backgrounds. The goal of a newsroom diversity is to create an intellectually mixed environment where everyone holds firm to the idea of journalistic independence.

Original Investigative Reporting

Reporters themselves uncovering and documenting activities that have been previously unknown to the public

Modern Journalism

Roots in coffee houses and bars. Where is your coffee discussion? Social media?

Dewey

Said Lippmann's definition of democracy was fundamentally flawed-The goal of democracy was not to manage public affairs efficiently-to allow people to develop their fullest potential-He believed that if people were allowed to communicate freely with each other, democracy was the natural outgrowth of the human interaction

What era of news are we in?

Show me era of news

Interpretive Investigative Reporting

Similar to original but involves more complex issues. Brings together information to give public a better understanding. Develops as the result of careful thought and analysis of an idea as well as dogged pursuit of facts to bring information together in a more complete context.

When did the news industry suffer and how did they fix it?

Suffered from 1980 to 1991. They fixed it by not separating the business side and reporting side of a news company. In these companies, independent public-interest journalism was the product the company was selling.

Independence from Faction

Suggests that there is a way to produce journalism without either denying the influence of personal experience or being hostage to it. The key to independence faction is whether one maintains allegiance to the core journalistic principles that build truthfulness and informing the public. The journalist is committed to society. The journalist's role is dedicated to informing the public, but not as an activist.

Displacement Theory of News

The argument that journalism can largely move beyond fact gathering and toward synthesis and interpretation.

What is the essence of journalism?

The essence of journalism is a discipline of verification.

Journalism of Verification

The foundation of the discipline of verification is to never add anything, never deceive the audience, be as transparent as possible about methods, rely on own reporting, and exercise humility. Tools in the discipline of verification include seeking multiple witnesses, explaining as much detail about sources, and asking many for comments.

The Awareness Instinct

The need to be aware of events beyond their direct experience. Knowledge of unknown gives people security. Exchanging this information becomes the basis for creating community and making human conections.

Reporting on Investigations

The reporting develops from a discovery or leak in info from an official investigation already under way or in preparation by others, usually govt. agencies. Govt. investigators actively cooperate with reporters in these cases to shape public opinion.

What is the firewall between the news and the business side of news companies?

The wall was a myth. It was just a way to assure readers that journalists were independent.

What is the greatest and newest challenge for journalists?

The web

The Theory of the Interlocking Public

Theory of how people interact with the news to form a public. There are levels of public engagement of every issue: involved public, interested public, and uninterested public. Our news media should still try to serve the interest of the widest community possible.

Platform Orthodox

They believed in and wanted to exploit the web's unique potential to tell stories in new ways and the audience community in their news gathering

How do you use metrics of the web?

This involves combining two sciences: 1. Content auditing: the science of creating variables that identify each story by different values 2. Then using metrics in a new way, correlating this values to one another and to traffic

What is it meant by "Journalists have an obligation to exercise their personal conscience"?

Those engaged in news must recognize a personal obligation to differ with or challenge editors, owners, donors, advertisers, and citizens and established authority if fairness and accuracy require them to do so.

What is the primary purpose of journalism?

To provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self governing (journalism for democracy)

Two pressures of the discipline of verification

Two pressures of the discipline of verification are the temptation to print something immediately because mistakes can be easily corrected later and the impulse to write news because it's already there are.

What two elements of journalism are missing from the citizens bill of rights?

Verification and conscience

What does it mean by "Journalists must serve as an independent monitor of power"?

Watching over the powerful few in society to guard, on behalf of the many, against tyranny

Infotainment

a mix of information and diversion oriented to personalities or celebrities, not linked to the day's events, and usually unrelated to public affairs or policy; often called "soft news" (late 1990s).

Journalism of Affirmation

a new political media that builds loyalty less on accuracy, completeness, or verification than on affirming the beliefs of its audiences, and so tends to cherry-pick information that serves that purpose. Example: talk shows-the host posing as an anchor and affirming preconceptions of the audience, assuring them, gaining their loyalty, and converting it into advertisement revenue

Management by Objecitve

by setting goals and attaching rewards for achieving them, a company can create a coherent system for both coordinating & monitoring what its executives are doing

Watchdog Role

role of investigative reporting, uncovering wrongdoing; monitor the powerful and give a voice to the voiceless

Objectivity

treating facts without influence from personal feelings or prejudices