Chapter 20: Ethics in the Changing Media Environment
Overview: The Environment for the News Media
Project for Excellence in Journalism, “The State of the News Media 2011,” the annual indepth study of American journalism: http://stateofthemedia.org/
Columbia Journalism Review, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” a report on
Oct. 19, 2009, by Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson. This is a detailed,
definitive study by two distinguished authors – Downie is a retired editor of The
Washington Post and Schudson is a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at
Columbia University. The study examines the current state of the news media, including
alternative sources of news such as pro-am partnerships. A key conclusion: “Many
newspapers can and will find ways to survive in print and online, with new combinations
of reduced resources. But they will no longer produce the kinds of revenues or profits that
had subsidized large reporting staffs, regardless of what new business models they
evolve.” The authors make recommendations for financing journalism.
http://www.cjr.org/reconstruction/the_reconstruction_of_american.php?page=all&print=t
rue
Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves, “The Story So Far: What We Know About
the Business of Digital Journalism,” May 10, 2011. You can download this detailed study
from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. An excerpt: “[M]any
sectors of the traditional news industry have been slow to embrace changes brought on by
digital technology. They also have been flummoxed by competitors who invest minimally
in producing original content but have siphoned off some of the most profitable parts of
the business. At the same time, digital journalism has created significant opportunities for
news organizations to rethink the way they cover their communities. And in several
organizations, old and new, we see promising signs that a transformed industry can
emerge from the digital transition—one that is leaner, quicker, and, yes, profitable. We
do not believe that legacy platforms should be disregarded or disbanded. It simply is not
reasonable to assume that any company would cast aside the part of its business that
generates 80 to 90 percent of its revenue. But we do think that companies ought to regard
digital platforms and their audiences as being in a state of constant transformation, one
that demands a faster and more consistent pace of innovation and investment.”
http://www.cjr.org/the_business_of_digital_journalism/
Alex S. Jones, Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
 Jones, who directs Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and
Public Policy, was interviewed on NPR’s “Fresh Air” on Aug. 19, 2009. A recording
of the interview and an excerpt of the book are at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111985662
Mike Webb, “ProPublica editor Paul Steiger discusses emerging ethical questions for
journalists,” ProPublica, Oct. 21, 2010. Steiger identified four distinct issues: the blurred
line between presentation of fact and opinion; the quest for building a larger audience
versus the need for journalism of substance and civic importance; the new business
challenges facing the industry; and the need for greater transparency from news
organizations.” This file contains the full text of Steiger’s remarks.
http://www.propublica.org/atpropublica/item/propublica-editor-paul-steiger-discussesemerging-ethical-questions-for-jou
Project for Excellence in Journalism, a survey of newspaper and broadcast news
executives’ attitudes about the economics of their industry, April 12, 2010. This survey
was conducted in association with the American Society of News Editors and the Radio
Television Digital News Association.
http://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/news_leaders_and_future
John Sullivan, “PR industry fills vacuum left by shrinking newsrooms,” ProPublica (copublished with Columbia Journalism Review, May 2, 2011. Sullivan writes that, as the
number of journalists has declined, the number of public-relations professionals has
grown. “The dangers are clear. As PR becomes ascendant, private and government
interests become more able to generate, filter, distort, and dominate the debate, and do so
without the public knowing it.” http://www.propublica.org/article/pr-industry-fillsvacuum-left-by-shrinking-newsrooms/single
Jodi Enda, “Retreating from the world,” American Journalism Review, Winter 2010. A
detailed accounting of how many American news organizations have diminished their
reporting of international news. http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4985
Justin Peters, “On Facebook and freedom: Why journalists should not surrender to the
Walmarts of the Web,” Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 2011. Peters
contends that in offering news organizations the opportunity to publish Facebook-specific
editions of their content, Facebook “furthered its ambitions to control every segment of
online activity, from commerce to conversation.” He concludes his essay, “[T]he news as
a public good will not survive if its future rests in the hands of people who don’t actually
care about the news.” http://www.cjr.org/essay/on_facebook_and_freedom.php?page=all
Financing Journalism in the Digital Age
Should online users pay for news content? Would they?
Lee Thornton, “Can the press fix itself? Steven Brill answers the question he asked a decade
ago,” American Journalism Review, February/March 2009. The entrepreneur says newspapers
are “committing suicide by giving journalism away for free.” http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4694
Walter Isaacson, “How to save your newspaper,” Time, Feb. 5, 2009. The author and journalist
proposes micropayments – “something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet, a one-click
system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper,
magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to
charge.”
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1877191,00.html
Rick Edmonds, “Is paid online content a solution or an impossible dream?” Feb. 20, 2009.
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=123&aid=158663
Brett Schulte, “Against the grain,” American Journalism Review, March 2010. Walter E.
Hussman Jr., publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, took the contrarian approach
by charging for online content from the beginning, and it has paid off for him.
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4859
John Morton, “The Morton Plan: Here’s how America’s newspapers can save
themselves,” American Journalism Review, April/May 2009. Morton, a newspaper
consultant, proposes that newspapers simultaneously offer readers the choice of getting
their paper online or in print for the same price. http://ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4738
Michael Kinsley, “You can’t sell news by the slice,” The New York Times, Feb. 10, 2009.
A rebuttal to Walter Isaacson’s proposal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/opinion/10kinsley.html
Lauren Rich Fine, “Micropayments? Won’t work. Here’s a better plan for newspapers,”
Feb. 23, 2009. The former newspaper stock analyst assesses the situation.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-micropayments-wont-work.-heres-a-better-plan-fornewspapers
David Carr, “Let’s invent an iTunes for news,” The New York Times, Jan. 12, 2009. A
proposal to have consumers pay for news with an electronic device.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/business/media/12carr.html
Peter Osnos, “What’s a fair share in the Age of Google?”, Columbia Journalism Review,
July/August 2009, 25-28. Osnos is the founder and editor-at-large of PublicAffairs Books
and a senor fellow for media for The Century Foundation. A particularly useful passage
in this article is his analysis (on page 26) of the current state of journalism economics, in
which he urges that a way be found to “redress the growing imbalance of power and
resources between traditional content creators and those who provide links to or
aggregate that material.” The Osnos piece is one of four articles in the magazine grouped
under the heading “No Free Lunch”: i.e., gathering the news is expensive and a way has
to be found to pay for it.
http://www.cjr.org/feature/whats_a_fair_share_in_the_age.php?page=all
Seth Mnookin, “The kingdom and the paywall, New York, July 24, 2011: “Some people
thought that on Arthur Sulzberger’s watch, The New York Times could actually become
extinct. They might need to issue a correction … Thedigital-subscription plan – the
famous ‘paywall’ – was working better than anyone had dared to hope.”
http://nymag.com/news/media/new-york-times-2011-8/
Clay Shirky, “Why we need the new news environment to be chaotic,” Shirky.com, July 9,
2011. Shirky argues that news has to be subsidized, cheap, and free.
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2011/07/we-need-the-new-news-environment-to-bechaotic/
What business models might work for newspapers?
Mark Glaser, “Your guide to alternative business models for newspapers,” mediashift,
Dec. 18, 2008. http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2008/12/your-guide-to-alternativebusiness-models-for-newspapers353.html
Douglas McCollam, “Somewhere east of Eden: Why the St. Pete Times model can’t save
newspapers,” Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 2008.
http://www.cjr.org/essay/somewhere_east_of_eden.php
Could nonprofits and philanthropy pay for journalism?
David Swensen and Michael Schmidt, “News you can endow,” The New York Times, Jan.
28, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/opinion/28swensen.html
David Shedden, “The role of philanthropy in journalism’s future,” poynteronline. Links
to articles about the topic. http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=132&aid=163568
Howard Kurtz, “ProPublica’s nonprofit’s news gathering pays off for partners,” The
Washington Post, April 19, 2010. “There was a time when most journalistic
investigations were carried by newspapers, when revenue was abundant and ‘I-teams’
were all the rage. But with nearly all papers hurt by cutbacks and some in bankruptcy,
ambitions have been downsized. And that has left a vacuum for ventures that don’t have
to worry about Wall Street expectations.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/04/18/AR2010041803107.html
Richard Pérez-Peña, “A.P. in deal to deliver nonprofits’ journalism,” The New York
Times, June 13, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/business/media/13press.html
Barb Palser, “Will the iPad save print?”, American Journalism Review, posted online Feb.
28, 2011. Technology is offering a glimpse of what the digital future could look like, but
it’s going to take a lot of trailblazing to get there. http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=5022
What if newspapers fail?
Rachel Smolkin, “Cities without newspapers,” American Journalism Review, June/July
2009: “As the economic noose tightens, the notion of big cities without local dailies
seems a real possibility. What would the impact be on civic life? And what might emerge
to fill the gap?” http://ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4781
Paul Starr, “Goodbye to the age of newspapers (hello to a new era of corruption),” The
New Republic, March 4, 2009. An analysis of the changing media environment.
http://www.tnr.com/article/goodbye-the-age-newspapers-hello-new-eracorruption?page=1
Gary Kamiya, “The death of the news,” salon.com, Feb. 17, 2009. If newspapers die, so
does reporting. If reporting vanishes, the world will get darker and uglier.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/02/17/newspapers/
The Problem of Infotainment
The Anna Nicole Smith case:
Mark Jurkowitz, “Anna and the astronaut trigger a week of tabloid news,” Project for Excellence in
Journalism, Feb. 12, 2007. http://www.journalism.org/node/4096
PEJ, “Anna Nicole Smith – anatomy of a feeding frenzy,” April 4, 2007.
http://www.journalism.org/node/4872
Carl Hiaasen, “We have seen the future, and it’s not pretty,” Miami Herald, March 4, 2007.
(Lexis/Nexis Academic)
A general discussion of infotainment and its implications for journalism:
Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know
and the Public Should Expect (New York: Crown, 2001), 150-155.
David Shaw, “News as entertainment is sadly becoming the norm,” Los Angeles Times, July 11,
2004. (Lexis/Nexis Academic)
Michael Schudson and Susan E.Tifft, “American journalism in historical perspective,” Geneva
Overholser and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Eds., The Press (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005),
40-41.
Thomas E. Patterson, “Doing well and doing good: How soft news and critical journalism are
shrinking the news audience and weakening democracy – and what news outlets can do about
it,” Joan Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University’s John F.
Kennedy School of Government, 2000, 4.
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/publications/reports/soft_news_and_critical_journalism_200
0.pdf
Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Public blames media for too much celebrity
coverage,” Aug. 2, 2007. The survey was based on a nationally representative sample of 1,027
adults conducted July 27-30, 2007.
http://people-press.org/report/346/public-blames-media-for-too-much-celebrity-coverage
Eric Alterman, “It ain’t necessarily so,” The Nation, Sept. 10, 2007: “Despite what many in the
media believe, the American public is interested in more than just right-wing punditry and
celebrity gossip.” http://www.thenation.com/article/it-aint-necessarily-so
Ellen Hume, “Tabloids, talk radio and the future of news,” © 1995 by The Annenberg
Washington Program in Communications Policy Studies of Northwestern University.
(Academic databases)
Deborah Potter, “Past their prime: Their audience shrinking, TV newsmagazines go
tabloid,” American Journalism Review, August/September 2005.
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3939
Quality Implications of “Media Convergence”
Deborah Potter, “Doing it all: Having the same person report and shoot the stories may save
money, but at what cost?”, American Journalism Review, October/November 2006.
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4213
Jane B. Singer, “Cross-platform journalism, partnering, and cross-ownership,” in Cecilia Friend
and Jane B. Singer, Online Journalism Ethics: Traditions and Transitions (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E.
Sharpe, 2007), 198-222. This chapter includes an essay by Mark Deuze, “Conversing about
convergence,” 204-207.
David Zucchino and Rick Loomis, “The Lifeline: A three-part Los Angeles Times series following
the lives of soldiers wounded in Iraq,” April 2-4, 2006.
http://www.latimes.com/la-na-wounded-series,0,5762347.special
Bob Haiman, “Can convergence float?”, poynteronline, Dec. 18, 2002. The president
emeritus of the Poynter Institute thinks convergence is bad for journalism.
http://poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=14540
The Internet’s Unresolved Issues
These issues are discussed in Chapter 18 and recapped briefly in this chapter because
they are among the new media environment’s important unresolved challenges. See
Chapter 18’s resources.
What Is Journalism? And Who Is a Journalist?
Knight Citizen News Network, “A guide to ‘crowdsourcing’: Reader-supplied information and
documents help nail down stories.” This site offers “tools for citizen journalists.”
http://www.kcnn.org/tools/crowdsourcing
Kelly McBride, “The problem with citizen journalism,” poynteronline, Sept. 24, 2006.
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=67&aid=97418
The Colbert Report, “Stephen Colbert’s meReporters: CNN lays off 50 staff members,
and Stephen gets in on the uncompensated future of news,” Nov. 28, 2011. In this video,
Colbert satirizes a new world in which citizen journalists, which CNN calls “iReporters,”
take over from the professionals. http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-reportvideos/403149/november-28-2011/stephen-colbert-s-me-reporters
Neil Henry, The American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 10-12, 31: “[The] arguments in favor of
citizen journalism, in which anyone with digital skills is presumed able and equipped to
report the news, also presume that effective and meaningful journalism in service of the
public interest is not a particularly difficult endeavor—that anyone can do it.”
Andrew Finlayson, “Live on the scene—on any screen,” The Communicator, Feb. 17,
2009. With a camera in every pocket, journalists aren't the only ones reporting the news.
http://www.rtnda.org/pages/posts/live-on-the-sceneE28094on-any-screen401.php
Geoffrey A. Fowler, “ ‘Citizen journalists’ evade blackout on Myanmar news,” The Wall
Street Journal, Sept. 28, 2007. “Citizen witnesses are using cellphones and the Internet to
beam out images of bloodied monks and street fires, subverting the Myanmar
government’s effort to control media coverage [of anti-government protests].”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119090803430841433.html
Leonard Pitts Jr., “Citizen journalists? Spreading like a cold,” The Miami Herald, Oct. 6,
2010. “You cannot be a journalist – citizen or otherwise – if credibility matters less to
you than ideology.” (News databases)
Radio Television Digital News Association, “Guidelines for user-generated content,”
http://www.rtnda.org/pages/media_items/guidelines-for-user-generated-content690.php
Howard Kurtz, “Who’s a journalist? It depends,” The Washington Post, June 14, 2005.
Journalists and the public have different opinions of who is a journalist and who is not.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/06/13/AR2005061301520_pf.html
Steve Myers, “How citizen journalism has changed since George Holliday’s Rodney
King video,” poynteronline, March 3, 2011. http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/topstories/121687/how-citizen-journalism-has-changed-since-george-hollidays-rodney-kingvideo/
See the concluding passage of Friend and Singer, Online Journalism Ethics, 217-218.
See “A free press in an electronic age,” Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements
of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect (New York:
Crown, 2001), 23-25.
The Future of Journalism
Tom Rosenstiel, “The future of news: Sense-making and other strategies for survival,”
poynteronline, June 9, 2006. “[W]e need to figure out what kind of news can build brand,
can define a franchise, and in which the public will find a special value.”
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=34&aid=102671
Larry Kramer, “Navigating the future: A newspaper guy turned successful new-media
entrepreneur says it’s unlikely that one overarching new business model will emerge for
journalism in the digital age. Instead, look for a collection of improvised arrangements
based on the lucky alignment of buyers’ and sellers’ needs. And that’s not necessarily a
bad thing.” American Journalism Review, December/January 2011.
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4961
Case Study No. 24: NBC’s Controversial ‘To Catch a Predator’
Video available online: Clips of “To Catch a Predator” episodes are available on the
Dateline NBC website: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10912603/
Douglas McCollam, “The shame game,” Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 2007.
http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_shame_game.php
Luke Dittrich, “Tonight on Dateline this man will die,” Esquire, August 2007.
http://www.esquire.com/features/predator0907
Dittrich, “Interview with Chris Hansen: the transcript,” July 10, 2007.
http://www.esquire.com/features/hansen-transcript?click=main_sr
Kelly McBride, “What’s wrong with ‘To Catch a Predator,’ ” Aug. 9, 2007.
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=67&aid=128057
Brian Ross and Vic Walter, “To Catch a Predator”: A sting gone bad,” ABC News: The Blotter,
Sept. 7, 2007.