Throughout the course, we’re going to be dealing with the relationships among technological, social, and institutional practices. The alphabet, the city, and the regimentation of humans into interchangeable parts of a hierarchically commanded-and-controlled social machine, co-evolved over thousands of years. The printing press, the emergence of a literate population, and the role of the public sphere in the creation of constitutional democracies were interdependently refined over hundreds of years . The Internet, the spread of not just networked connectivity but networked social practices, and the emergence of global civil society -- whatever form it ultimately takes -- are similarly connected. And now, the pace of change is measured in years and decades. The readings for today tell us about the way newsgathering and reporting used to be done, about the way traditional news organizations attempted to innovate through digital technologies, and about the key characteristics of the new media that journalists, citizens, and citizen-journalists are beginning to use to create new kinds of publics and exercise new kinds of public power.
I control one screen. While I lecture, you can use the iBooks to send comments and questions to the room’s AIM ID. At times, I will respond to them in real-time. At other times, I’ll respond at the end of the lecture. It’s possible for the class to cpllectively structure its own discussion in this manner, based on whatever thoughts the readings have stimulated, and in reaction to what I have to say. That it is possible is not a guarantee of success. If an experiment proves fruitful, we’ll continue. If it doesn’t, we’ll try another experiment. We’ll probably try a number of different experiments with the technological milieu this classroom offers. Is it possible to develop a fruitful pedagogy that includes multitasking? We’re going to try.
Before the news, there was the public, and before the public, there was caffeine. Important aspects of the institutions of science, constitutional democracy, and capitalism emerged from conversations in the 17th century coffeehousees of London, Paris and Amsterdam. The Royal Society, the Newton-era institutionalization of science, grew out of the meetings at a coffee house known as The Grecian, where Newton and Edmund Halley once dissected a dolphin on a coffee table. If you wantedto get in on the beginnings of the insurance industry, you probably got your caffeinated beverage at Lloyd’s. If you wanted to engage in the trading of stock, you ordered your coffee from bewigged waiters at the Royal Exchange. The London Stock Exchange was founded by a breakaway group of underwriters from the Royal Exchange, and they kept the bewigged waiters around until the Big Bang of the late 20th century turned the Exchange into a purely virtual enterprise.
“The coffee-houses that sprang up across Europe, starting around 1650, functioned as information exchanges for writers, politicians, businessmen and scientists. Like today's websites, weblogs and discussion boards, coffee-houses were lively and often unreliable sources of information that typically specialised in a particular topic or political viewpoint. They were outlets for a stream of newsletters, pamphlets, advertising free-sheets and broadsides. Depending on the interests of their customers, some coffee-houses displayed commodity prices, share prices and shipping lists, whereas others provided foreign newsletters filled with coffee-house gossip from abroad.” -The Economist Dec 2003 (http://www.economist.com/World/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2281736)
Kovach and Rosenstiel’s Elements of Journalism, which we’ll read in subsequent weeks, claims that “The first news papers evolved out of these coffeehouses around 1609, when enterprising printers began to collect the shipping news, gossip, and political arguments from the coffeehouses and print it on paper.
Einkommende Zeitung, the “Incoming News”, the first daily publication “established by the bookseller Timotheus Ritzsch in Leipzig in 1650.” -Digitizing the News p. 5 As McLuhan pointed out, Gutenberg made Henry Ford possible: the use of moveable type in printing pioneered the use of standardized, interchangeable parts. The linear order of printed letters, sentences, and paragraphs -- and the mechanical way of thinking it fostered -- presaged the machinery of the industrial revolution. For three and a half centuries, newspapers have had headlines, paragraphs, and datelines. “This combination of age, ubiquity, and standardization endows the newspaper with a strong degree of familiarity.”
The format of a newspaper is fairly standardize, so that the reader can quickly figure out what she is looking at, regardless of which newspaper it is or if it is print or online. (Benedict Anderson -- you all think of yourself as part of something bigger when you all wake up, read the same newspaper, and think in terms of all the other people who read the same newspaper). Robert Park in 1925: “The first newspaper in America…was published by the postmaster. The village post office has always been a public forum, where all the affairs of the nation and the community were discussed. It was to be expected that there, in close proximity to the sources of intelligence, if anywhere, a newspaper would spring up.” In its origins, news and news media were associated with places -- from coffeehouses to post offices. The mass media virtualized that place through the “imagined communities” invoked in the minds of mass audiences. According to one of our readings, the web and its virtual communities is bringing a sense of place back into news media.
According to Bimber’s Information and American Democracy, the “penny post” that encouraged the growth of a lively, vulgar, commercial, public sphere -- and the foundation of the first great media empires -- was subsidized by the US postal service. It was a laborious process to set type… Newsreel Theater
Multimedia news circa 1940s -- if you wanted to see and hear what was happening in Berlin or the Great Lakes, you went down to the Newsreel theater. One way to think about the public is to think about who journalists imagine to be the audience for their work. Robert Darnton, a veteran print newsman, reacted to early research into the mental images reporters had of their readers.
The public in minds of reporters, in research cited by Darnton, sorted into two broad: “supportive” readers or “critical readers.”
“The experimenters found that writers with supportive ‘image persons’ reported good news more accurately than they reported bad news, and that writers with critical ‘image persons’ reported bad news with more accuracy. Pool and Shulman concluded that accuracy was congruent with a reporter’s fantasies about his public.” -Darnton p. 175 “Reporters operate in city rooms, not in classrooms. They write for one another as well as for the public.” -Darnton Houston Post 1953
Darnton noted that the structure of the newsroom was an analogue to the power structure of the news organization, with the editor in chief in a separate office, the reporters organized around specialized desks. You could spend your career moving from one end of the room to the other. Darnton noted three other important characteristics of the working milieu of the newspaper reporter: Reporters wrote for, and were constrained and rewarded by, each other. Reporters from other papers were also part of their mental public Writing news for a newspaper was a specific craft learned through apprenticeship, under the tutelage of editors. A symbiotic and sometimes antagonistically manipulative relationship existed with sources.
(http://www.angelfire.com/tx4/toastedposties/postphotohistory.html) In 1979, you were beginning to see screens on desks, along with typewriters and rolodexes, but the layout and organizational structure hadn’t changed much. In 1979, you were beginning to see screens on desks, along with typewriters and rolodexes, but the layout and organizational structure hadn’t changed much.
One of our ongoing texts is Boczkowski’s Digitizing News, not only because it is an incisive and timely study of how American daily newspapers dealt with the advent of electronic publishing, but because the author zooms back to look at the entire technological and social process of change. While other authors, like Giussani -- or myself, for that matter --, take a revolutionary approach, emphasizing the ways certain new technologies radically transform older social practices such as journalism, Digitizing the News takes an evolutionary approach: “New media emerge by merging existing social and material infrastructures with novel technical capabilities, a process that also unfolds in relation to broader contextual trends.”
Arpanet 1960 WWW 1990 Mosaic 1993 Netscape 1994
“Media innovation unfolds through the interrelated mutations in technology, in communication, and in organization.” The technical, the social, the political are always intertwined -- they are implicit in the word “media.” Is “TV news” the cameras and broadcasting stations and television receivers? Is it the journalistic practice of electronic news gathering? Is it ABC, CNN, or AOL?
Since the invention of the transistor in the late 1940s, advances in electronic miniaturization put million dollar, two-ton cameras in the palm of our hands and wireless communication devices in your pocket. At that time, broadcast news became an industry, an economic force, and a powerful political instrument . In parallel, the development of affordable, portable, powerful digital computers and the deployment of a worldwide communications network converged.
Three case studies of “online newsrooms aiming to exploit the web’s capabilities” -- New York Times on the web Technology section, Houston Chronicle’s Virtual Voyager, and New Jersey Online’s Online Community connection: American dailies have seen new information technologies through the lens of print and assumed that the future would be an improved but not radically different version of the present.
“First, actors engaged in innovation tend to pursue interdependent technological and social transformations simultaneously. That is, they do not concentrate on either shaping the artifact or taking advantage of its social effects; they undertake both sets of actions at the same time.” Digitizing the News, p 9
“Second, the interweaving of technology and society is an ongoing process. Hence , the shaping of an artifact does not stop after the emergence of a dominant design, and the conditions for the cultural consequences of its use start being created long before its initial deployment. Moreover, in this continuous process, partial outcomes at an earlier stage influence events”
Third, cultural and material changes do not proceed in a historical vacuum, but are influenced by the legacy of processes that preceded them.
“Diversity, community, and movement seem to be three concepts around which we could develop a theory and a practice for online journalism in the months and years ahead,” Bruno Guissani, a journalist whose first job was with one of the last Swiss dailies to set the led type, conceived, developed, and edited the Swiss online newspaper, Webdo. He knew that repackaging newspaper content wouldn’t do for the Web -- which he did not hesitate was invented in Geneva. Interactivity, hypertext, and multimedia capabilities would have to be used in ways that were out of the question for traditional news dailies.
The author saw that the few-to-many mass-media, by treating people as a mass audience, negated their individuality. There never is a single public. Hypertext, the capability of branching to another document and finding your way back again, affords diversification -- the ability to present news to multiple publics simultaneously.
Giussani quoted Katherine Fulton in the Columbia Journalism Review, in regard to the importance of multimedia capabilities,: “Journalists used to work in one medium and spent their lives mastering its nuances. In the future, when print, sound, and pictures are all simply digital bits, they may find themselves asking which tools are right for what stories.” Now, a few years after Katherine Fulton looked into the future, you can read the blog of a KRON-TV journalist, equipped with broadcast-quality portable digital camera, laptop, and editing tools.
Besides the ability to present multifaceted material to diverse publics, and the multimedia capabilities of the broadband web, Giussani considered “community” -- social interaction -- to be an essential element for journalistic success in the milieu of the web. Interactivity is not just clicking on a link. It’s about connecting people. “A newspaper is no longer a product. It becomes a place.”
"New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about.
They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with.
And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop."
-Neil Postman, “A New Media”