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The Decline of Modern Journalism in the Neo-Partisan Era

Richard Campbell

It may not be essential to save or promote any particular news medium, including printed newspapers. What is paramount is preserving independent, original, credible reporting, whether or not it is popular or profitable, and regardless of the medium in which it appears.

(Downie & Schudson, 2009)

Writing for Rolling Stone in March 1992, media critic Jon Katz foresaw the authority of modern newspapers being usurped by a variety of “new news” or postmodern forms that combined information, entertainment, opinion, and analysis. Katz (1992) claimed that the authority of the most prominent daily papers, such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, was being challenged by “news” coming from talk shows, sitcoms, popular films, rap music, and – add to that today – various Internet sites, 24–hour cable news shows, and Comedy Central's The Daily Show and Colbert Report.

Katz was partly correct back then, but what he did not foresee was the rise of intense partisanship in news media, especially in 24/7 cable news and on Internet blogs. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, news outlets tried to appear neutral and appeal to the largest audience possible. This was a profitable strategy for journalism. So why in the twenty-first century has journalism returned to its old partisan roots? Today we have the ongoing feuds between cable news channels, along with the 24/7 blogosphere attacks on both the right and the left. Partisanship itself is making the news today.

What is most intriguing about this intense partisanship is the way it recalls the press of the past. Newspapers in the eighteenth century, subsidized by their political parties, cultivated a nasty partisanship, rivaling and even surpassing today's venom. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson ran papers in which they attacked each other. Newspapers referred to President George Washington at various times as “a horse beater,” “a dictator,” “a most horrid swearer and blasphemer,” “a spoiled child,” and “a tyrannical monster” (Lewis, 1991, pp. 54–55; Burns, 2006, pp. 178–179).

But by the nineteenth century the press started to strike a more detached and moderate tone in its reports. In the 1830s, when the telegraph first enabled news to instantly crisscross the country, journalism began moving away from partisanship and the seeds of modern journalism were sown. To complement the new technical advances, editors called for a focus on the immediacy of the present. Modern print journalism de-emphasized political discussions and historical context, instead accenting the new and the now. Historians mark this period in the 1830s and 1840s as the beginning of the transition from the partisan to the modern press era. Though US journalism began as a venue for partisan politics (with papers taking one side or the other in debates over issues such as constitutional amendments, slavery, and states' rights), in the nineteenth century publishers figured out how to sell news more profitably as a product. They used modern technology – including the rotary press and cheaper paper – to substantially cut their costs; they also began to change news content to appeal to emerging and literate middle- and working-class people, who could now afford a paper and had some leisure time to read one. Publishers realized that they needed more practical and current everyday content that appealed to readers across the political spectrum.

Ironically, the key reason for the current neo-partisanship in our news media is economics, just as a neutral stance was “good business” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Partisanship is profitable again. Today's media marketplace is a fragmented world where there are more media options than ever. Network TV news has lost more than half its viewers in the last decade to cable news, social networks, blogs, and Twitter. Newspaper readership also continues to age and decline, as young readers turn to Facebook, online news aggregators like Google and Yahoo!, and their smart phones. The former mass audience is morphing into smaller niche users who chase particular politics, hobbies, and forms of entertainment. Media outlets that hope to survive must appeal not to mass audiences but to interest groups – to conservatives or progressives or sports fans or history buffs or reality TV addicts. For the news media, muting political leanings to reach a mass audience makes no sense in a world where a mass audience no longer exists. Instead, news media now make money by targeting and catering to niche interests.

What created the 1990s crisis in the authority of traditional newspapers was complicated, but the changes Katz identified were real. Reporters then (and now) were often regarded with suspicion – as grim doomsayers who only report on life's seamy underbelly; as peeping-tom invaders of celebrity culture and personal privacy; as shady plagiarizers who make up quotes and fabricate sources; as cynical critics of revered national leaders; as smug semi-professionals disconnected from the everyday problems of working people; or as opportunistic polarizers interested only in pitting left against right in superficial dramas. In fact, in Gallup public opinion polls measuring people's confidence in journalism from the early 1990s and to the late 2000s, respondents who said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of “confidence in newspapers” dropped from 40% to less than 25% (Morales, 2010).

As recently as the 1970s, many newspapers were highly regarded – particularly the Washington Post – viewed as major players in toppling a corrupt White House administration during the Watergate scandal. By the mid-1970s, journalism schools overflowed with students eager to take up careers in what was perceived as a noble profession, which, at its best, served as a serious check on the abuses of governmental and institutional power. But since those heady days of Watergate, journalism's reputation has declined dramatically in the public eye.

Part of the decline is explained by a public – and many journalists – who came to distrust the so-called “objective” ideal of journalism, which had been held up as a professional goal for most of the twentieth century. Of course, journalism was always a narrative endeavor, not some sort of “objective” data set. Journalists interpreted the world, made choices about which experiences to cover (and which to exclude), and rendered them not as scientific reports but as news stories. In addition, TV news began exposing the print ideal in the 1950s. The narrative point of view in the news shifted away from print's detached third person (“The Senate yesterday voted 52–48 to raise taxes by 5 percent on middle-class Americans”) to broadcasting's personal first person (“Well, our taxes are going up again”). In the 1950s and into the twenty-first century, TV news anchors became “stars” and celebrities, invited into people's living rooms each evening to deliver the news personally. Viewers knew them by their first names (Walter, Peter, Tom, Brian, and Diane), whereas print journalists were often faceless, anonymous, and as detached as their front-page point of view. In eroding the more detached print model, news became more conversational and intimate, paving the way for news celebrities: “talking head” cable pundits like Sean Hannity and partisan Internet bloggers like Matt Drudge. In a fragmented marketplace, those journalists and pundits who tell the loudest and most dramatic stories have begun spooning small but profitable pieces from the news media pie as the mass audience turns to menu items that feed their individual interests.

In such a news food court, we are witnessing the accelerated decline of an era of mainstream US journalism that promoted fact-gathering, documents, and expertise, and held up “objectivity” as the ideal for journalistic practice. Rising in its place is a new era of partisan journalism – a “journalism of assertion” – partly a return to journalism's colonial roots and partly the deterioration of the “journalism of verification.” This transition is marked by the rise of the news pundit as a kind of “expert” with more standing than verified facts, authentic documents, or actual experts (see Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2007, pp. 78–112). In addition, today the new partisan fervor found in news outlets online and on cable has a made major contribution to the nation's intense political and ideological divide.

The Roots of the Objective Ideal and Journalism's Modern Period

Although the objective ideal in journalism is associated with the twentieth century, the early commercial and partisan press did in fact provide some impartial coverage of events. These papers often carried verbatim reports of presidential addresses, murder trials, or the annual statements of the US Treasury. In the late 1800s, this journalistic ideal was overshadowed as newspapers pushed for circulation and emphasized “sensational” stories about scandals and corruption, especially in New York. By the late 1890s, as media sociologist Michael Schudson (1978) has noted, two distinct types of journalism were competing for readers: a story model, advanced by the penny and yellow press, which dramatized important events and told stories about people's personal lives, and an information model, advocated by the six-cent papers, which emphasized an approach that appeared more factual (pp. 88–120).

As the consumer marketplace expanded nationally during the Industrial Revolution, facts and news became marketable products. Throughout the mid-1800s, the more a newspaper appeared not to take sides on the front page, the more its readership base could be extended (although editorial pages were often rabidly supportive of particular political candidates). In addition, wire-services organizations were serving a variety of newspaper clients in different regions of the country. To satisfy all their clients and a wide range of political views, newspapers needed to appear more impartial.

The ideal of an impartial, or informational, news model was championed by Adolph Ochs, who bought the New York Times in 1896. Ochs's staff of editors rebuilt the paper around substantial news coverage and provocative editorial pages. To distance themselves from the yellow press, the editors downplayed entertainment news and sensational features, favoring the documentation of major events or issues. Such distancing was partly a marketing strategy to counter the large mass circulations of the Hearst and Pulitzer papers. Ochs offered a distinct contrast to the more provocative newspapers: an informational paper that provided stock and real-estate reports to businesses, court reports to legal professionals, treaty summaries to political leaders, and theater and book reviews to intellectuals. Ochs's promotional gimmicks took direct aim at yellow journalism, advertising the Times under the motto: “It does not soil the breakfast cloth.” The strategy of the Times was similar to many TV marketing plans today that target upscale, 18- to 49-year-old viewers who spend a disproportionate share of consumer dollars.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, with publishers interested in expanding readership and reporters adopting a more detached “scientific” posture toward news-and fact-gathering, the ideal of objectivity began to anchor journalism. Under the banner of “objective” or modern journalism, which distinguishes factual reports from opinion columns, reporters strive to maintain a neutral attitude toward the issue or event they cover; they also search out competing points of view among the sources for a story. Civil War correspondents developed the so-called inverted pyramid style of reporting by imitating the terse, compact press releases that came from Lincoln's secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton (Mindich, 1993, 1998). Often stripped of adverbs and adjectives, such reports began, as they do today, with the most dramatic or newsworthy information, straightforwardly answering who, what, where, and when questions at the top of the story (and less frequently, why or how).

By the 1920s the New York Times had become the official “paper of record,” the standard that other newspapers emulated and that libraries throughout the country stocked to document daily occurrences. Filled with the texts of treaties, court reports, political speeches, and other national documents, the Times became more than a powerful alternative to the storytelling of earlier papers; it became the official way to do journalism in the 1900s. The modern reporter evolved, ideally, as a detached and neutral observer who gathered information and adapted it to informational or so-called objective formulas.

For much of the twentieth century, this “inverted pyramid” news style served as an efficient way to arrange a timely story. As journalism educator John Merrill (1971) once pointed out, the wire services that used the inverted pyramid style when distributing stories to newspapers nationwide “had to deal with large numbers of newspapers with widely different political and regional interests. The news had to be ‘objective’ [. . .] to be accepted by such a heterogeneous group” (p. 240). Among other things, the importance of objectivity and the reliance on the inverted pyramid signaled journalism's break from the partisan tradition. Although difficult to achieve, the notion of objectivity nonetheless became the guiding ideal of the modern press.

Despite the financial success of the New York Times and other informational papers, the more factual approach toward news came increasingly under criticism. In the 1920s, progressives like Walter Lippmann thought that news had become too descriptive and needed more analysis (Lippmann, 1920). Assessing 1960s mainstream print journalism, the New York Times' Tom Wicker (1978) argued that inverted pyramid journalism reported “mostly the contents of official documents, or statements delivered by official spokesmen,” and had become entrenched as the dominant journalistic model, presenting “statements only in the most obvious terms” (pp. 3–5). The press, Wicker noted, “had so wrapped itself in the paper chains of ‘objective journalism’” that it could report very little beyond “bare and undeniable” facts (pp. 3–5). Michael Schudson (1978) argued that by the end of the 1960s “objectivity in journalism, regarded as an antidote to bias, came to be looked on as the most insidious bias of all. For ‘objective reporting’ reproduced a vision of social reality which refused to examine the basic structures of power and privilege” (p. 160). The criticism continued. As Poynter news writing coach Roy Peter Clark (1984) once noted: “Some reporters let the pyramid control the content so that the news comes out homogenized. Traffic fatalities, three-alarm fires, and new city ordinances all begin to look alike. In extreme cases, reporters have been known to keep files of story forms. Fill in the blanks. Stick it in the paper” (p. 47).

News Values, Individualism, and Conflict: The “Story” of Modern News

Even though journalists transform events into stories, many generally still believe, despite criticism, that they are – or should be – neutral observers who present facts without passing judgment. Conventions such as the “inverted pyramid” news lead, the careful attribution of sources, the minimal use of adverbs and adjectives, and a detached third-person point of view all help reporters perform their work in a supposedly neutral way. Like lawyers, therapists, and other professionals, many modern journalists believe that their credibility derives from personal detachment. Yet the roots of this view reside in less noble territory. Critic Jon Katz (1993) has discussed the history of the neutral position:

To reach as many people as possible across a wide spectrum, then, publishers and editors realized as early as the 1840s that softening their partisanship might boost sales.

“Neutral” journalism remains a selective process. Reporters and editors turn some happenings into reports and reject many others. This process is governed by a deeper set of subjective beliefs that are not neutral. Sociologist Herbert Gans (1979), who studied the newsroom cultures of CBS, NBC, Newsweek, and Time in the 1970s, generalized that most US reporters and editors share several basic “enduring values,” including ethnocentrism, responsible capitalism, and small-town pastoralism.

But for Gans, individualism was the most prominent value underpinning daily journalism. Many idealistic reporters are attracted to this profession because it rewards the rugged tenacity needed to confront and expose corruption. Beyond this, individuals who overcome personal adversity are the subjects of many enterprising news stories. And certainly our culture's interests in individual achievement and notoriety help nourish the media's obsessions with particular celebrities. Unfortunately, journalism that focuses mainly on the personal fails to explain how large institutions work or fail. Many conventional reporters and editors are unwilling or unsure of how to tackle the problems raised by institutional decay and organizational dysfunction. While journalists possess the narratives for telling the tales of prominent or extraordinary individuals, they often don't have ready formulaic narratives to frame social problems or institutional complexity. In addition, because journalists are accustomed to working alone, many are uncomfortable cooperating on team projects or participating in citizen forums.

Traditionally, as Michael Schudson (1978) has argued, reporters have aligned facts with an objective authority and values with subjective feelings. Within this context, news reports offer readers and viewers details, data, and description. It then becomes the citizen's responsibility to judge and take a stand about the social problems represented by the news. Given these assumptions, modern reporters are responsible only for adhering to the traditions and rituals of their trade – “getting the facts” and rendering them as “objective” accounts. As a result, many reporters view themselves as neutral “channels” of information rather than as citizens themselves, actively involved in telling the stories that help shape our perceptions of public life.

By the end of the twentieth century, the neutral or objective ideal had been fully exposed and journalists faced harsh criticism from the right, the left, and center – and from comedians who served as equal opportunity satirists of both the news media and the major characters they covered. As critics and audiences grew more cynical, people found comfort in “news” outlets that were decidedly partisan. Audiences went in search of stories that affirmed their politics and confirmed their values. News outlets sought to tell and sell stories that captured audiences' growing mistrust of “neutral” journalism. Back in a 1963 NBC staff memo, Reuven Frank, NBC news division president, got to the actual heart of journalistic practice: storytelling. He outlined a narrative strategy integral to all TV news: “Every news story should [. . .] display the attributes of fiction, of drama. It should have structure and conflict, problem and denouement, rising and falling action, a beginning, a middle, and an end” (Frank, 1965, p. 276). Despite Frank's candid insights, most journalists were uncomfortable thinking of themselves as storytellers, even though storytelling is the main cultural frame through which people make sense of their everyday experiences. For much of the twentieth century, journalists viewed themselves mainly as fact-gatherers or information conduits, trying to distance themselves both from partisanship and from the storytelling mandate of their daily jobs.

Most journalists, and journalism educators, came to define news by a conventional set of textbook criteria for determining newsworthiness: information most worthy of transformation into news reports. Although other elements could be added to the list, news criteria generally have included timeliness, proximity, prominence, human interest, novelty, and deviance. But the real heart of journalistic storytelling is conflict – the key ingredient in any good fictional story. As Gans (1979) noted in his seminal study of news values just mentioned, modern journalists were socialized professionally into setting aside, as best they could, their political views and personal opinions in order to select and develop news stories based on different combinations of these criteria. The bottom line for most mainstream journalists became telling a good story – full of conflict – not necessarily covering important social issues, and certainly not advancing a partisan position.

Driving the news selection process, issues and events that seem timely or new take precedence. Reporters cover speeches, meetings, crimes, or court cases that have just happened. In order to rate as news, most of these events also have to occur close by, or in proximity to, readers and viewers. Although slimmed-down local papers used to offer more national and international news, readers and viewers today find the bulk of news devoted much more to their own towns, communities, and regions – sometimes called “hyperlocalism.” The decline of national and international news has much to do with the downsizing of local and regional papers, whose declining advertising base has forced most of them to shrink their size, their content, and their staffs.

In addition to the near and the new, prominence and human interest play a role as well. Reader and viewer surveys indicate that most people identify more closely with a person than with an abstract issue. And stories need characters. Therefore, the news media tend to report stories on powerful or influential people who serve as those central characters. Because these individuals often play a role in shaping the rules and values of a community, journalists have traditionally been responsible for keeping a watchful eye on them. But reporters also look for unusual “human interest” topics: extraordinary incidents that happen to ordinary people. In fact, good reporters can often relate a story about a complicated issue by illustrating its impact on one person or family.

News is also often about the novel and the deviant, and about characters involved in novel or deviant events. When events happen that are outside the routine of daily life, such as a Congresswoman shot at a political rally, a bride running away from her impending marriage, or a priest on trial for molesting boys, the news media are there. Reporters are routinely assigned to cover events that deviate from social norms, including murders, rapes, fatal car crashes, fires, and political scandals.

Finally, and most importantly, news topics are transformed into narratives that contain a healthy dose of conflict – a key ingredient in fictional and nonfictional storytelling. In fact, in developing news narratives, reporters are encouraged to seek contentious quotes from those with opposing views. For example, stories on any presidential election almost always feature dramatically opposing Republican and Democratic views. National issues like social security, healthcare, and global warming are typically covered as two-sided arguments, often favoring and featuring two positions from the most extreme or dramatic points of view. Newsweek's Evan Thomas (2008) pushes this point further, arguing that the “real bias” in news is not political but professional. He contends that what drives most news reports is the search for conflict and character:

Although newsworthiness criteria are a conventional way to define news, they also reveal much about the cultural aspects of news. As culture, news is both a product and a process. It is both the morning paper, evening newscast, or the online blog and a set of subtle values and shifting rituals that have been adapted to historical and social circumstances, such as the partisan-press ideals of the 1700s and the informational model of the twentieth century. As culture, then, mainstream journalists are socialized into the process of gathering information and making narrative reports that offer selected frames of reference. In constructing those frames, reporters must meet deadline pressures, while also trying to help the public make sense of prominent characters, key events, and the central tensions of the moment.

The Transformation of Reporting Rites in the New Partisan Era

In the new partisan era, represented especially by evening cable news shows, it has become more acceptable for guest journalists not only to report information but also to take stands, make judgments, and promote their own publications. In the early days of cable news, newspaper reporters were discouraged by their editors from appearing on these shows and thereby compromising their neutrality. However, over time, editors and publishers saw cable appearances as a way to promote their newspapers. Prominent national reporters, thanks to their exposure on cable news, have become celebrities themselves.

To reach this point, however, a stock of modern reporting rituals had to be incorporated into the new era. Developed during journalism's modern twentieth-century era, they include (1) overemphasizing the present, (2) getting the “good” story, (3) relying on expert sources, (4) reducing events to “two-sided” dimensions, and (5) confronting leaders and institutional representatives who are covered in reporters' daily rounds. In fact, these rituals have become compatible with the new partisan era, supporting the individualism of journalists and the centrality of conflict and character in their stories.

First, as members of an emerging modern profession, journalists in the twentieth century drew criticism for failing to offer historical analyses of important phenomena. In news stories about drugs, for example, individual characters – dealers, addicts, abusers, police, medical experts – passed through the frame of news. However, once these characters were no longer timely, they no longer served the narrative requirements of daily news. Urban drug stories heavily dominated print and network news during the 1986 and 1988 election years. Unfortunately, such stories had virtually disappeared from the news in 1992 and 1994, even though the nation's serious drug and addiction problems had not diminished (see Reeves & Campbell, 1994). Drug stories simply became “yesterday's news.” Modern journalism tends to reject “old news” for whatever new event or idea comes along. In the mid-1990s, when statistics revealed that drug use among middle-class high school students was rising, reporters again latched onto new versions of the drug story during the 1996 elections, but their reports made only limited references to the 1980s. And although drug problems and addiction rates did not diminish in subsequent years, these topics were virtually ignored by journalists during more recent national elections. Indeed, given the space and time constraints of daily journalism, reporters seldom link stories to historical contexts.

In the new partisan era, with the emergence of 24/7 news cycles, the emphasis on the new and the now has intensified. Not only do traditional newspaper and TV reporters cover tabloid-style stories, but cable pundits and Internet bloggers now analyze them for days and weeks, offering cynical and repetitive partisan interpretations, as when US Representative Anthony Weiner got caught sending sexually explicit photos to young women on Twitter and Facebook. When the Democratic House minority leader said that in a live press conference she would focus not on the Weiner scandal but on job creation and the dismal economy, all the cable news services – Fox News, CNN, MSNBC – turned away from her remarks and declined to cover the proceeding.

In addition to the preoccupation with the present, a second ritual – “getting the good story” – remains as central in the new era as it did in the old. In the Weiner case, three major cable news services concluded that the “good story” was the House Democratic speaker commenting on a discredited, scandal-ridden legislator and not one on the economy and jobs. According to Don Hewitt (personal communication, February 21, 1989), who created 60 Minutes in 1968, “There's a very simple formula if you're in Hollywood, Broadway, opera, publishing, broadcasting, newspapering. It's four very simple words – tell me a story” (see also Hewitt, 2001). For most journalists, then, the bottom line is getting a “good” story, an edict that overrides most other concerns.

Journalistic scoops and exclusive stories try to portray reporters as heroes of their own stories: they have won a race for facts, which they have gathered and presented ahead of their rivals. It is not always clear, though, how the public is better served by a journalist's claim to have gotten a story first. Certainly, enterprising journalists can get a story started by calling attention to an important problem or issue. But on occasion, as with the July 1999 plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife, and his sister-in-law, scoop behavior leads to “herd” journalism, which occurs when reporters stake out a house or follow a story in such large groups that the entire profession comes under attack for invading people's privacy and exploiting personal tragedies. Although readers and viewers might value the tenacity of adventurous reporters, the earliest reports are usually not better than stories written days later with more context and perspective.

A third ritual of modern print journalism – relying on outside sources – has made reporters heavily dependent on experts. Columnist Jonathan Alter once called such sources the “usual suspects.” Alter (1985) contended that “the impression conveyed is of a world that contains only a handful of knowledgeable people. [. . .] Their public exposure is a result not only of their own abilities, but of deadlines and a failure of imagination on the part of the press” (p. 69). This lack of imagination and the reliance on official sources signal another vulnerability in traditional journalism. Critics during the first Gulf War back in the early 1990s noted that once the war started, voices of dissent virtually disappeared from television news. Perhaps even more alarming, in a two-week study in early 2003 that looked at the major news networks and PBS's News Hours program – before the war against Iraq started – Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR, 2003) found that 76% of all 393 sources used were former or current government (or military) officials. Only 17%, or 68 on-camera sources, expressed skepticism about the war, at a time when most polls showed that more than 60% of US citizens favored a diplomatic solution to the crisis. Only three sources in this study – less than 1% – represented organized antiwar groups.

By the late 1990s, many journalists were also being criticized for blurring the line between remaining neutral and being an expert. While former shows like CNN's Crossfire once pitted opinionated columnists and reporters against one another, the boom in 24-hour cable news programs in the late 1990s created a demand for talk programs featuring interviews with journalists willing to give their views on the hot story of the day, rather than more expensive at-the-site reporting. In covering major media events, print journalists now appear several times a day on cable programs acting as experts, not only offering the facts they have gathered but providing opinion and speculation as well. Some editors have even encouraged their reporters to go on these shows in the hope of selling more magazines and newspapers. The Washington Post, for example, routinely provides a set for its reporters who appear on television that prominently features the paper's logo behind its reporter of the moment. Many critics contend that these practices erode the credibility of the profession by blending journalism with celebrity culture and commercialism.

In the new partisan era, experts abound alongside pundits, bloggers, and cable hosts. With the 24/7 news cycle, the great demand for experts who provide their opinions fills up time, inexpensively. It is now simply harder to tell who is an expert and who is not. Pundits, bloggers, and hosts often comment on key issues and events without providing supporting evidence or documentation and without revealing how they know what they know. The relatively cheap cost of these programs, coupled with their appeal to lucrative niche partisan markets, has further destabilized the already shaky neutrality ideal of modern-era journalism.

For many journalists of the modern era, neutrality simply meant telling two sides of a story. This notion that news is two-dimensional represents a fourth taken-for-granted ritual of the news process. A reporter sent to cover tax increases or local crime might be given this editorial advice (as I once was): “Interview Republican and Democratic leaders from the district and have them fight it out in the story.” Such “balance” is a narrative device that helps generate story conflict. For most journalists, balance means presenting all sides of an issue without appearing to favor any one position. Unfortunately, because time and space constraints do not always permit representing multiple sides, in practice this value has often been reduced to “telling both sides of a story.” In recounting news stories as two-sided dramas, reporting often misrepresents social issues that are complex and multidimensional. The abortion controversy, for example, is almost always treated as a story that pits two extreme positions (anti-abortion vs. pro-choice) against each other. People whose views do not fall at either end of the spectrum are seldom represented.

In claiming neutrality and inviting readers to share in their detached perspective, journalists circumvent their own values. The authority of their third-person, all-knowing point of view (a narrative device that many novelists use) enhances the impression of neutrality by making the reporter appear value-free. The claim for balanced stories, like the claim for neutrality, disguises journalism's narrative functions. After all, when reporters choose quotes for a story or news photographers choose camera angles, these are usually the most dramatic or conflict-oriented words or images that emerge from an interview, press conference, or public appearance. Choosing quotes or images often has more to do with enhancing drama than with being fair or establishing neutrality. The balance claim – at least for much of the twentieth century – had been in the financial interest of modern news organizations. William Greider, a former Washington Post editor, made the connection between good business and balanced journalism back in 1988: “If you're going to be a mass circulation journal, that means you're going to be talking simultaneously to lots of groups that have opposing views. So you've got to modulate your voice and pretend to be talking to all of them” (quoted in Hertsgaard, 1988, p. 78).

Again, the new partisan era marks a shift away from courting “mass” audiences to chasing niche markets. In fact, today it often pays to be one-sided. For example, CNN, which has more reporting resources than other cable news networks, still tries to balance or modulate its voice in the evening, adhering to the old model of “telling both sides” of a story with the host and reporters generally striking a neutral pose. Fox News, however, goes after conservative viewers, while MSNBC courts liberals and progressives. While these cable outlets often bring opposing points of view into their stories, the scales are tipped by the star pundit hosts, who appeal to their audiences and in the end take partisan stands, not neutral ones.

Complementing the search for conflict, the fifth ritual is the one that journalists take much pride in: their adversarial relationship with the prominent leaders and major institutions they cover. The prime narrative frame for portraying this relationship is sometimes called a “gotcha” story, which refers to the moment when the reporter confronts a villain or corners a wrongdoer. This narrative strategy is frequently used in political reporting. Some journalists assume that leaders are hiding something and that the reporter's main job is to ferret out the truth through tenacious fact-gathering and tough questions. An extension of the search for balance, this stance locates the reporter in the middle, between “them” and “us,” between political leaders and the people they represent.

Critics of the tough-question, bulldog style of reporting argue that it fosters a cynicism among journalists and actually harms the democratic process. Although journalists need to guard against becoming too cozy with their political sources, they sometimes go to opposite extremes. By constantly searching for what politicians may be hiding, reporters may miss other issues. News scholar Jay Rosen (1992) has argued that “the essential problem is that the journalist's method of being critical is not disciplined by any political vision” (p. 6). In other words, the bottom line for neutral or conventional journalists, who claim to have no political agenda, is maintaining an adversarial stance rather than improving the quality of political stories and discussions. When journalists employ the gotcha model to cover news, being tough often becomes an end in itself. Thus reporters believe they have done their job just by roughing up an interview subject.

In the new partisan era, the bulldog role is being usurped by the radio and TV commentators who pronounce their various positions, but often with little or no supporting evidence or on-site reporting to verify or ground their opinions. This is what Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel (2007) have called the “journalism of assertion,” contributing to a toxic “public sphere” that “has become an arena solely for polarized debate, not for compromise, consensus, and solution” (p. 86). They contrast this with the “journalism of verification” – what for them is “the beating heart of credible journalism,” which is about doing disciplined reporting, citing reliable documents, and finding significant evidence. In their view, modern objectivity, fairness, and balance are not the goals of journalism; they are simply “techniques,” “devices,” and “methods” for “testing information” in order to achievea “transparent approach to evidence.” For Kovach and Rosenstiel, “the journalist is not objective, but his method can be” (p. 78); they argue that the cornerstone of journalism education should be “the study of evidence and verification” (p. 83). Similarly, New York Times editor Bill Keller (2011), writing about WikiLeaks, champions the value of impartial, nonpartisan journalism, which is increasingly at risk: “Your obligation, as an independent news organization, is to verify the material, to supply context, to exercise responsible judgment about what to publish and what not to publish and to make sense of it” (pp. 46–47).

Differences Between Print and Television News

In the 1950s and 1960s, with the ideal of “objectivity” already under siege, the institution of journalism was significantly altered as television introduced new styles to the news delivery. TV news began to take journalistic practice in directions that ran counter to the objective model. This was partly accomplished merely by the shift in narrative point of view, with TV anchors telling stories from first- and second-person points of view and offering a conversational, more intimate presentation of news. In the new partisan era, both the personal point of view and the emotional displays by cable pundits and online bloggers are descended from TV news. But many blame early television and now cable for blurring the boundary between entertainment and information – an updated two-sided version of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century battle between story and information print models.

From about 1955 through 1957, the three major television networks – ABC, CBS, and NBC – moved their entertainment divisions to Los Angeles, in part because of its close proximity to Hollywood production studios. Network news operations, however, remained in New York. Symbolically, these cities came to represent the two major branches of TV programming: entertainment and information. The shifting rules and rituals of US journalism were encapsulated in the career of former radio reporter John Daly, host of the CBS game show What's My Line?. When he began moonlighting as the evening TV news anchor on ABC, the fledgling network blurred the so-called entertainment and information border, foreshadowing what by the 1990s had become a central criticism of journalism.

Officially, print news came under the full spell of television with the arrival of the colorful USA Today in 1982, radically changing the look of most major US dailies. This new paper incorporated features closely associated with postmodern form, including an emphasis on visual style over substantive news and the use of brief fragmented news items that appealed to readers' short TV-era attention spans. USA Today represents the only successful launch of a new major US daily newspaper in the last several decades. Showing its marketing savvy, USA Today was the first paper to pay grudging tribute to TV's increasing influence on journalism. Marketers at the paper even designed its vending boxes to look like color TV sets. USA Today also has preferred the present tense of broadcast style (“he says”) rather than print's past tense (“she said”).

Although TV news reporters share many values, beliefs, and conventions with their print counterparts, television has transformed journalism in a number of significant ways. Whereas modern print journalists have been expected to remain detached and relatively anonymous, TV news has always linked its credibility to live, on-the-spot reporting, believable imagery, and viewers' trust in the anchors who read the news. In fact, since the early 1970s, the annual Roper polls have indicated that the majority of viewers find TV news more credible than print news. Many viewers have tended to feel a personal regard for the local anchors who appear each evening on TV sets in their homes. And many print journalists for years resented operating in the relative anonymity of newspaper work while their TV counterparts became mini-celebrities in their communities.

By the mid-1970s, the public's fascination with the Watergate scandal – combined with the improved quality of TV journalism – helped local news departments realize profits. In an effort to retain high ratings, stations began hiring consultants, who advised news directors to invest in one of the national packaged formats, such as “Action News” or “Eyewitness News.” Traveling the country, viewers might notice similar theme music and opening visuals from market to market. Consultants – called “news doctors” – also suggested that stations lead their newscasts with crime blocks: a group of stories that recount the worst local and national crimes of the day. A cynical slogan soon developed in the industry: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Even today, most regional news stations around the country lead newscasts with local isolated crime stories, even though such stories have very little significance for most viewers.

A few stations, however, responded to viewers and critics who complained about the overemphasis on crime, especially since FBI statistics revealed that crime rates fell in most major urban areas during the 1990s. For example, in 1996 the news director at KVUE-TV in Austin, Texas launched a new set of criteria that had to be met for news reports to qualify as responsible crime stories. She asked that her reporters answer the following questions: Do citizens or officials need to take action? Is there an immediate threat to safety? Is there a threat to children? Does the crime have significant community impact? Does the story lend itself to a crime-prevention effort? With KVUE's new standards, the station eliminated many knee-jerk crime stories. Instead, the station provided a context for understanding crime rather than a mechanical running tally of what crimes were being committed each day (see Holley, 1996).

In addition to news consultants pushing dramatic crime stories, another strategy they favor to counter the grimness of crime coverage is “happy talk”: the seemingly ad-libbed but usually scripted banter that goes on among local news anchors, reporters, meteorologists, and sports reporters before and after news reports. During the 1970s, consultants often recommended such chatter to create a more relaxed feeling on the news set and to foster the illusion of conversational intimacy with viewers. Some news doctors also believed at the time that happy talk was indeed an antidote to that era's “bad news,” which included coverage of urban riots and the Vietnam War. A strategy still used in local news today, happy talk often appears forced and may create awkward transitions, especially when anchors must report on tragic events. Although the situation has improved slightly at some local news stations, national news consultants, such as Frank Magid Associates, continue to set the agenda for what local reporters should cover – lots of local crime – as well as how they should look: young, attractive, pleasant, with little regional accent. Essentially, news doctors have tried to replicate in modern local TV news the ad images of young attractive models that have dominated television advertising since the 1960s, to create continuity between the look of news and the look of the advertising that the news interrupts.

In the new partisan era, “happy talk” has been downgraded. Today the kind of unscripted banter in cable news and the online blogosphere is far less happy – part of a culture of complaint in which pundit hosts and their roundtable of journalists, experts, and friends tend to belittle everything from the government to the other political party to one another. But the key value of the new “partisan chatter” – in addition to appealing to the targeted audience – is its relative cheap costs. Unscripted cable news programs invest little in international or domestic bureaus or investigative projects that require reporters go to the scene, interview key players, and document what is actually happening. This business strategy is much like reality TV programming, which now dominates the television landscape, spurning professional actors and writers for amateurs and loose or unscripted narratives.

Visual Language, Critical Limits, and Fake News

The complexity of the shift from a print-dominated culture to a televisual culture of news is often reduced to a two-dimensional debate about information versus entertainment. However, such criticisms overlook the visual language of TV news and the ways in which images may capture events more powerfully than words. Over the past 60-plus years, TV news has dramatized the United States' key events and provided a clearinghouse for shared information. For example, it is widely acknowledged that the civil rights movement benefited enormously from televised pictures that documented the plight of Southern blacks in the 1960s. Other enduring TV images are embedded in collective memory: the Kennedy and King assassinations in the 1960s; the turmoil of Watergate in the 1970s; the space shuttle disaster and the Chinese student uprisings in the 1980s; the first war on Iraq, the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, and the Clinton impeachment hearings in the 1990s; 9/11 and a second war on Iraq that began in 2003; and the 2011 uprisings by Arab citizens against dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen among other Middle Eastern countries. During these critical events, national TV news serves as a cultural and social reference point.

But while it is important to acknowledge the crucial historical role that television news has played since its inception, it is likewise critical to understand the subtle ways visual language operates. For example, the mid- to late 1980s saw the rise of a disturbing TV news strategy designed for dramatic effect. In their coverage of crack cocaine, news operations formulated a visual shot in which news photographers (using shaky, handheld cameras) leaped from the back of police vans and followed gun-wielding authorities as they broke down the doors of crack houses. In this type of shot, TV news actually represented the police or state point of view. A profession that prides itself on neutrality and on watching over the police on society's behalf apparently did not question whether it was appropriate for reporters to implicitly tell these stories from the authority's viewpoint (see Reeves & Campbell, 1994).

In assessing the visual power of TV news, images do not stand as a kind of testimony to “reality” that is somehow more authentic than the printed word. Just as there is a construction and selection process in print, images in TV news are also constructed, camera angles are selected, and other images and angles remain invisible. For example, in one ritual shot designed to establish credibility – called a “stand-up” – a TV producer might situate a reporter in front of a courthouse or the White House, when in fact the reporter never entered the courthouse or the White House on that particular day. The pictures make it look like the reporter was at the scene and on top of the situation – and physically present at a newsworthy location – serving as eyewitness to the world.

In the new partisan era, astute critiques of TV and cable news can be found on Comedy Central's The Daily Show, anchored by Jon Stewart. The program nightly parodies that formulaic “stand-up” by digitally superimposing a cast of fake reporters in front of exotic foreign locales, Washington, DC, or other US locations. The program also parodies the objective ideal and the “both sides of story” ritual. In a 2004 exchange with “political correspondent” Rob Corddry, Stewart asked him for his opinion about presidential campaign tactics. “My opinion? I don't have opinions,” Corddry answered. “I'm a reporter, Jon. My job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other. Little thing called objectivity; might want to look it up” (quoted in Albanese & Stewart, 2004).

As news court jester, Stewart exposes the melodrama of TV news and cable punditry that nightly depicts the world in various stages of disorder yet overseen by the stalwart, comforting presence of celebrity anchors and pundit hosts from their in-studio, high-tech command centers. As a satirist, Stewart is not so reassuring, arguing that things are a mess and in need of repair. For example, while a national news operation like MSNBC thought nothing of adopting the Pentagon slogan “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in 2003 as its own graphic title, The Daily Show countered with “Mess O'Potamia.” Even as a fake anchor, Stewart displays a much greater range of emotion than we get from detached modern anchors: more amazement, irony, outrage, and skepticism. In fact, Stewart's emotional range is much more akin to the emotional heat of cable pundits and disgruntled bloggers. Stewart, after all, is courting a niche audience of mostly young disaffected viewers who trust neither traditional news nor cable punditry.

Much of what “fake” news shows critique has to do with the way news producers repeat stale familiar formulas rather than invent dynamic new story forms. Although the world has changed, local TV news story formulas have gone virtually unaltered since the 1970s, when Saturday Night Live's “Weekend Update” on NBC first started satirizing TV news. Modern newscasts still limit reporters' stories to two minutes or less and promote stylish male–female anchor teams, a sports “guy,” and a certified meteorologist as familiar personalities, usually leading with a dramatic local crime story and teasing viewers to stay tuned for a possible weather disaster.

60 Minutes and the Reporter as Star

Although local news rituals have had an impact in changing the face of regional journalism, the most influential journalistic enterprise at the national level has been 60 Minutes (see Campbell, 1991). In the over 50-year history of television, 60 Minutes – with its signature detective narrative – remains the only program rated No. 1 in three different decades. It is the most popular and profitable TV program in prime-time history, finishing among the Nielsen top 10 for 24 consecutive years – another record. During the 2010–2011 TV season, 60 Minutes consistently remained a top-20 program in the ratings. From the mid-1970s to the 2000s, a typical episode of 60 Minutes reached a bigger audience than any other single news form in US journalism. The program set the standard for investigative TV reporting and dramatic news narratives that few of the many copycat magazine shows have approached. Just as the presentation and narratives of local TV news have not changed much since the 1960s, 60 Minutes and the prime-time TV news magazine were probably the last major innovations in traditional network news. But while it remains high in the ratings, its own formulaic stories have grown old along with its audience.

Over the years, critics have tried to explain 60 Minutes' standing as the United States' first popular news program. In 1981, the program's creator, Don Hewitt, told the Chicago Tribune that storytelling was the key to the program's appeal (“Father of 60 Minutes,” 1981). Hewitt rightly predicted that personal journalism, starring reporters in mini-news dramas, would dislodge hour-long news documentaries in which the network point of view – what Hewitt (1985) calls “the voice of the corporation” (p. 29)–seemed tedious, institutional, and aloof. As the precursor to the personal style of today's cable pundits and Internet bloggers, Hewitt elevated reporters, including Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Dan Rather, Ed Bradley, Diane Sawyer, and Leslie Stahl, to star status – a place formerly held only by news anchors, not by interchangeable reporters.

Hewitt's program was able to downplay that 60 Minutes is a corporate extension of CBS News (until the fateful 1995 spiked tobacco story – the subject of the Hollywood movie The Insider). Instead, it played up the role of reporters as champions of the little guy and solid middle-American values – another role that cable hosts have taken on in the new partisan era. But instead of identifying with left or right, Hewitt positioned his show and its reporters in the moderate middle – a better economic strategy in the days of the mass audience that 60 Minutes commanded. Along with the appeal to moderate politics and middle America, Hewitt adapted a fictional story form – the detective mystery – to TV journalism. Through this familiar cultural frame, the reporters of 60 Minutes have performed over the years, not as detached journalists but as dramatic characters. Their mission: to locate themselves in the middle of an adventure and make sense of the world through their stories. In fore-grounding the dramatic story, 60 Minutes further weakened the old “information” model. The program's reporters were viewed not as neutral conduits of information but as major characters in the news with a stake in the outcome, much the way cable news hosts and popular Internet bloggers have positioned themselves as players in the cultural and political landscape.

Even the production techniques on the program contributed to the image of the reporters as detective heroes (Campbell, 1991). First, unlike the conventional evening news, 60 Minutes' correspondents are featured characters in their dramas. They are usually in more shots than any of the subjects interviewed. Second, the program's star reporters typically receive more visual space: they are almost always shown at a greater distance than the characters they interview. Frequently, in reaction shots, interview subjects appear in extreme close-ups – usually with the top of the head cut from the frame. This is in contrast to the medium shots of the reporter, usually shown from mid-waist with space revealed overhead. The greater space granted to the reporters can read on one level as the TV counterpart to print's neutral third-person point of view. But on another level, the greater distance endows the show's reporters with more authority. 60 Minutes' reporters always appear in greater control, whereas other people who appear on the program often seem to be in less control, or out of control. It is the medium shot that locates the program's reporters “in the middle most of the time,” playing “both sides of the street.” In other words, at the height of the program's popularity, the moderate political voices found on 60 Minutes served the network's economic interests in cultivating a mass-market audience. In contrast, today's partisan voices serve the interests of cable news operations in targeting niche viewers in a fragmented market.

Given that 60 Minutes developed over the years as the premier investigative arm of US journalism, it was a surprise in late 1995 when the show decided not to air an episode on the tobacco industry spiking nicotine levels after legal threats from one cigarette company's lawyers. In fact, this icon of investigative journalism caved into Big Tobacco at a time when CBS was being sold to Westinghouse, and apparently the corporate bosses – and the program's own journalists with investment ties to the transaction – did not want to hamper the deal. So they waited for the Wall Street Journal to break the story and then aired the episode two months later. Disney – which owns ABC and the copycat TV news magazine 20/20 – then made a movie about the spiked story (The Insider, Michael Mann, 1999).

In the end, stories about the inner economic and political workings of complex institutions – including CBS/Viacom – are not well suited for 60 Minutes. And, in fact, this can be said for most journalism: there are few good story forms for explaining how institutions work or do not work. Instead, the detective narratives of 60 Minutes often transformed experience into melodrama, making the world simpler and more understandable. Like Westerns and cop shows, 60 Minutes has usually championed rugged individualism. In its wake, the cable pundits and digital bloggers likewise are champions of rugged individualism and avowed opponents of government institutions. Detective stories celebrate individual heroes and condemn institutional villains. In this way, journalism in general suffers from this malady that plagues 60 Minutes, even as significant as some of its best investigative pieces have been: stories centering on the afflictions of individuals make the world seem like a place where problems are personal not social, requiring only private redress or remedy rather than any sort of collective action.

Contemporary Journalism in the Corporate Era

The full-blown arrival of the new partisan era in journalism history was preceded by the corporate era. In fact, the 60 Minutes spiked story incident reveals that by the late 1990s, journalism was in the heyday of its corporate era. Journalism – so central to US democracy that it is the only business enterprise the founders protected in the Constitution – spent the first part of the nineteenth century freeing itself from political partisanship, only to find itself near the end of the twentieth century under the strong influences of corporate machinations. And the very process that US citizens count on to report on this phenomenon became quiet. It is not in the interest of national or global corporate powers to have their journalism extensions reporting the details of their bosses' business. After all, these kinds of complex “big money” stories – which US viewers actually are interested in – do not fit neatly into formula stories that focus narrowly on the lives of individuals (albeit sometimes individuals wronged at the hands of dysfunctional institutions). How do journalists tell stories about complex institutional problems when many of these powerful institutions are their own corporate parents?

Although corporate control is strong on the newspaper side of the journalism business (Gannett operates the largest newspaper chain in the world, controlling more than 90 daily newspapers), the real impact of the current corporate incarnation is in television. Here journalism outlets throughout the 1980s and 1990s became minor subsidiary companies in large entertainment conglomerates that now own movie studios as well as journalism businesses. Disney, in addition to its theme parks and film division, owns ABC News; Viacom, which owns Paramount studios, remains the majority stockholder over CBS News; General Electric (and now Comcast, the majority stockholder), which has run NBC News, purchased Universal Studios in 2003; News Corporation owns Fox News in addition to Twentieth Century Fox studios; and Time Warner, which operates CNN, owns Warner Brothers studios among its many other holdings as the world's largest media corporation.

US journalism, of course, has always borne the marks of social schizophrenia, trying to balance its role as public servant to democracy – a watchdog on power and corruption – and its role as profit-making business. But in journalism's corporate phase this balance tipped far too much in favor of narrow business interests and greedy profiteering (see O'Shea, 2011). Both print and TV journalism outlets put far less money into investigative units and, over the years, have done very little business reporting on media ownership issues.

The “big media” corporate era began its slide, first of all, with the loss of newspapers' local monopolies over classified advertising, which had sustained newspaper families and chains like Gannett for decades. On top of that, readers started going elsewhere for the news – to 24/7 cable channels like CNN, which often rendered obsolete much of the national and international news in the morning paper. However, the bigger problem suffered by media corporations, where bigger once seemed better, came from not recognizing quickly enough that the marketplace was fragmenting and the new innovative players – like Craigslist, eBay, The Huffington Post, Drudge Report, Politico, Google, Facebook, and Twitter – would be more nimble, with smaller startup costs, appealing first to niche audiences and not the mass market. Many of these sites saw that what was needed in a new media climate overloaded with information was not necessarily more content but a way to organize the online terrain and guide customers through the content maze, aggregating popular information and the best stories.

The Waning of the Corporate Era

Newspapers were overwhelmed by two changes that collided with the economic recession that began in 2008. First, new generations of readers grew up not on their local paper's comic strips and sports sections but on cable TV and the Internet. By 2009, more than 65% of the population over age 65 reported reading a newspaper the previous day, compared to less than 30% of young people between 18 and 35. Second, the advertising climate cooled. Newspapers lost their strong grip on classified ads with the emergence of mostly free websites like Craigslist and eBay. Revenue from such ads peaked in 2000, with newspapers earning a total of $19 billion from classifieds ads. By 2009 US newspapers earned only $6 billion from their classified advertising sections. The economic recession and housing crisis from 2008 to 2010 had substantially limited traditional retail ads, especially from department stores, realtors, and car dealers. Newspaper advertising overall spiked in 2005 at $49 billion in earnings, but by 2009 that figure was cut almost in half to just $27.6 billion (Newspaper Association of America, quoted in Parr, 2010). With fewer advertisers, newspapers laid off workers, shrank their size, changed formats, or declared bankruptcy.

On top of advertising problems, many newspaper owners like the Tribune Company, which declared bankruptcy in 2008, had become overleveraged. That is, many media conglomerates borrowed lots of money in the 1990s to buy more media companies and newspapers to expand their businesses and profits. They used some of the borrowed money to fund these purchases and some they invested. Then they used the interest from their investments, plus profits from ad revenue, to pay their bank and loan debt. But when advertising tanked and their investments began losing money in fall 2008 (as the stock market crashed), many big media companies became incapable of paying their debts. To raise capital, reorganize their debt, and avoid bankruptcy, media companies had to lay off reporters and sell valuable assets.

Around 2005, consolidation in newspaper ownership leveled off. The decline in newspaper circulation and ad sales panicked investors, leading to drops in the stock value of newspapers. Many newspaper chains responded by significantly reducing their newsroom staffs. According to Pew's State of the News Media report (Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2010a), about “13,500 jobs for full-time, newsroom professionals” have disappeared since 2007, “the total falling from 55,000 to 41,500. [...] That means that newsrooms have shrunk by 25 percent in three years. [...] To put it another way, newspapers headed into 2010, devoting $1.6 billion less annually to news than they did three years earlier.”

The case of the Los Angeles Times (owned by the Tribune Company) demonstrates well the impact of cost-cutting measures on even the most prominent national papers. Continuing demands from the corporate offices for cost reductions led to the resignation of editor John Carroll in 2005. In 2006, another editor and publisher resigned to protest demands for further cuts. More cuts in 2007 resulted in the departures of some of the most talented staff members, including six Pulitzer Prize winners. In 2007, Chicago real estate developer Sam Zell bought the Tribune Company for $8 billion and made it private, insulating it for a time from market demands for high profit margins. However, by 2008 the company faced declining ad revenue and a tough economy and was forced to file for bankruptcy protection. While the Tribune Company continues to operate its newspapers, its recent history illustrates the enormous economic troubles even very good and very large papers face (see O'Shea, 2011).

About the same time, large newspaper chains started to break up, selling individual newspapers to private equity firms and big banks (like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase) that deal in distressed and overleveraged companies with too much debt. For example, in 2006, Knight Ridder – then the nation's second leading chain – was sold for $4.5 billion to the McClatchy Company. McClatchy then broke up the chain by selling off 12 of the 32 papers, including the San Jose Mercury News and Philadelphia Newspapers (which owns the Philadelphia Enquirer). McClatchy also sold its leading newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, for $530 million, less than half of what it paid for it eight years earlier. By 2010 private equity companies owned the Star Tribune and the San Diego Union Tribune and sought control of Philadelphia Newspapers and the Tribune Company, which was still in bankruptcy restructuring in 2011.

Ownership of one of the nation's three national newspapers also changed hands. In 2007 the Wall Street Journal, held by the Bancroft family for more than one hundred years, accepted a bid of nearly $5.8 billion dollars from News Corporation head Rupert Murdoch. At the time, critics raised concerns about takeovers of newspapers by large entertainment conglomerates. As small subsidiaries in large media empires, newspapers have been increasingly treated as just another product line expected to perform in the same way that a movie or TV program does.

By 2008, a number of concerned journalists, economists, and citizens began calling for new business models that would help protect newspapers in the transition to the digital era and keep newspapers out of the hands of private equity companies that usually had more interest in turning a profit than supporting journalism. One possibility is nonprofit ownership. For example, the Poynter Institute owns and operates the St. Petersburg Times, Florida's largest newspaper. As a nonprofit, the St. Petersburg Times has been protected (at least before 2008) from the unrealistic 16 to 20% profit margins that publicly held newspapers earned pre-mid-2000s. National Public Radio (NPR) represents another nonprofit model, where funding is provided by government subsidies and private contributions. Another possibility for nonprofit ownership is for wealthy universities like Harvard and Yale to purchase and support newspapers, better insulating their public service and watchdog operations from the expectations of the marketplace. Finally, as an alternative to private equity companies, wealthy Internet companies like Microsoft and Google could expand into the news business, buy existing media outlets, and produce content for both online and print papers. In fact, Yahoo! in 2010 began hiring reporters to increase the presence of its online news site. The company hired reporters from politico.com, BusinessWeek, the New York Observer, the Washington Post, and Talking Points Memo, among others. Aggregators like Google and Yahoo!, unlike private equity firms, have more of an interest in delivering customers to the best information and stories – that is, the kind of content that attracts advertisers.

Academic journalism departments have responded to the crisis in the newspaper industry by providing valuable assessments of the problem and proposing reforms. One such response was initiated by the dean of Columbia University's Journalism School, who commissioned a study from Leonard Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, Columbia journalism professor and media scholar. Their 2009 report, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” focused on the lost circulation, advertising revenue, and news jobs. The report aimed to create a strategy for local reporting that would hold public and government officials accountable, envisioning ways to provide basic access to the kinds of information that citizens need to be well informed. Their recommendations, some of which are underway, were as follows:

• News organizations “substantially devoted to reporting on public affairs” should be allowed to operate as nonprofit entities in order to take in tax-deductible contributions while still collecting ad and subscription revenues.
• Philanthropic organizations and foundations should “substantially increase their support for news organizations” that have shown a commitment to public affairs news and the kind of reporting that holds local leaders, politicians, officials, and government agencies accountable.
• Public radio and TV, through federal reforms in the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), should reorient their focus to “significant local news reporting in every community served by public stations and their Web sites.”
• Operating their own news services or supporting regional news organizations, public and private universities “should become on-going sources of local, state, specialized subject and accountability news reporting as part of their educational mission.”
• A national Fund for Local News should be established with money that the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) collects from “telecom users, television and radio broadcast licensees, or Internet service providers.”
• News services, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies should use the Internet to “increase the accessibility and usefulness of public information collected by federal, state, and local governments.”

While these recommendations offer promise, they are striking in how reliant they are on nonprofit and public solutions. For-profit mainstream news media remain reluctant to embrace public solutions given their long-standing belief that taking government or other institutional support diminishes their independence. While NPR in particular remains a solid example of a nonprofit news service that offers national and regional coverage, many critics worry about local coverage. In fact, even the major foundations prefer the big spotlight of giving money to more visible national and international news initiatives rather than small local and regional ones. Still, with the loss of so many traditional reporters in the early 2000s, the situation is dire enough that at the very least public and private partnerships offer some hope in ensuring that local reporting and accountability coverage remain central to regional news services.

The Decline of Public Journalism and the Rise of Citizen Reporters

In the wake of the widespread popularity TV news during the broadcast era, a number of regional newspapers – starting in the late 1980s – experimented with ways to “fix” print journalism and to more actively involve readers in the news process. In part, editors tried to counter television's intimacy, with viewers commonly referring to anchors by their first names but hardly knowing print's anonymous reporters. Experiments surfaced primarily at midsize daily papers, including the Charlotte Observer, the Wichita Eagle, and the Virginian-Pilot. Davis “Buzz” Merritt (1995), former editor and vice president of the Wichita Eagle, defined key aspects of civic or public journalism:

• It moves beyond the limited mission of “telling the news” to a broader mission of helping public life go well, and acts out that imperative.
• It moves from detachment to being a fair-minded participant in public life.
• It moves beyond only describing what is “going wrong” to also imagining what “going right” would be like.
• It moves from seeing people as consumers [...] to seeing them as a public, as potential actors in arriving at democratic solutions to public problems (pp. 113–114).

Modern print journalism has always drawn a distinct line between reporter detachment and community involvement. However, public journalism – driven by citizen forums, community conversations, and even talk shows – tried to redraw this line. The impetus behind public journalism was the realization that many citizens felt alienated from participating in public life in a meaningful way. This alienation arose, in part, from watching passively as the political process played out in the news media. The process today stars the politicians who run for office, the “spin doctors” who manage the campaigns, the reporters who dig into dark corners of people's personal lives, and now loud partisan cable and blogging pundits, while readers and viewers serve as mere spectators.

The public journalism movement drew both criticism and praise. Though not a substitute for investigative reporting or the routine coverage of important daily events, public journalism offered a way to involve both the public and journalists more centrally in civic and political life. Editors and reporters interested in addressing citizen alienation (and reporter cynicism) began devising ways to engage people as conversational partners in determining the content of the news. In an effort to draw the public into discussions about community priorities, these journalists began sponsoring reader and citizen forums, where readers were supposed to have a voice in shaping aspects of the news that directly affected them.

Although isolated citizen projects and reader forums are sprinkled throughout the history of journalism, the more recent public journalism movement began in earnest in the late 1980s. One such project began in Wichita, Kansas, after the 1988 elections. Davis Merritt was so discouraged by the paper's typical and conventional political coverage that he led a campaign to use public journalism as a catalyst for reinventing political news. The Eagle's first voter project during the 1990 campaign for governor used reader surveys and public forums to refocus the paper around a citizens' agenda. This involved dropping the tired horse-race model that usually frames political coverage. Merritt believed that a new direction for journalism must “reengage citizens in public life” through two steps: “add to the definition of our job the additional objective of helping public life go well, and then develop the journalistic tools and reflexes necessary to reach that objective” (Merritt & Rosen, 1998, p. 44). The Eagle's project partially revitalized regional politics in Kansas in the early 1990s.

By the late 1990s, more than a hundred newspapers, many teamed with local television and public radio stations, practiced a form of public journalism. Yet many critics remained skeptical of the experiment (see Cohn, 1995). First, they were concerned that public journalism projects could undermine journalists' long-standing role as neutral watchdogs and instead pander to what readers – and marketing executives – wanted, thereby reassigning editorial control from newsrooms to business interests. Second, some journalists feared that as they become more active in the community they would be perceived as community boosters rather than as community watchdogs, compromising their ability to report on the wrongdoings of civic organizations. Third, critics worried that public journalism compromised the profession's credibility, arguing that public journalism turned reporters into participants rather than detached observers. (Of course, as Merritt pointed out, modern journalism had already lost a great deal of credibility with the public – a view supported by polling data.) Fourth, critics contended that public journalism undermined the telling-both-sides-of-a-story convention of journalism by constantly seeking common ground and community consensus. Public journalists countered that they were trying to set aside more room for centrist positions. Such middle positions are representative of many viewpoints in a community but are often missing in the mainstream news, which is traditionally more interested in the extremist views that make for conflict-ridden, two-sided dramatic stories.

In the end, public journalism did not foresee or address the changing economic structure of the news business. With more newspapers (and broadcast stations) in the hands of fewer owners, both public journalists and traditional reporters should have been raising tough questions about the disappearance of competing daily papers and the large profit margins generated by regional monopoly newspapers. Facing little competition, newspapers in the early 2000s continued the trend of cutting reporting staffs and expensive investigative projects and reducing the space for news. Such a trend increased profits and satisfied stockholders for a while, but it also limited community voices and views. Then when the economic crisis hit in 2008, accompanied by major losses in retail and classified advertising and multiple bankruptcies, the newspaper business had a full-blown disaster on its hands.

In retrospect, it is helpful to look at public journalism's inability to adequately respond to economic shifts in journalism. Particularly troubling was the rise in the number of journalism outlets that became cogs or subsidiaries in large multinational conglomerates, many of which earned the bulk of their money from media hardware and/or entertainment software (Sony, GE, Comcast, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, News Corp.). Still, the public journalism movement served as a worthy critic of fundamental news values – like reportorial detachment – that have so powerfully shaped the practice and culture of US journalism.

The latest incarnation of public journalism is known as “citizen journalism.” The biggest distinction between them is that, where the former was driven by professionals, the latter is driven by amateurs. The combination of the online news experiments and traditional newsroom cutbacks has spurred a grassroots movement in which activist amateurs and concerned citizens – not professional journalists – use the Internet and blogs to both cover events and disseminate information. In fact, with such steep declines in newsroom staffs, many professional media organizations – like CNN (iReport) and many regional newspapers – are increasingly trying to corral citizen journalists as an inexpensive way to make up for journalists lost to newsroom “downsizing.” Journalism students and programs around the country now partner with newspapers to produce reports, especially for online news consumption. Traditional newsrooms today face the very real paradox of being asked by publishers and owners to cut staff at the same time they are being asked to produce more online content.

Some news critics and journalism teachers, like New York University's Jay Rosen, envision citizen journalism as a new era. Rosen (2006) calls this public citizenry “the people formerly known as the audience.” They now have their own printing presses (and online radio stations and TV stations) and share in the creation of news. Others, like Columbia journalism school dean Nicholas Lemann (2006), see citizen journalism as a possibility, but only with the hard work of reporting to create a foundation for all the opinion that is out there in cyberspace and 24/7 cable: “Reporting [...] is a powerful social tool, because it provides citizens with an independent source of information about the state and other holders of power. It sounds obvious, but reporting requires reporters. They don't have to be priests or gatekeepers or even paid professionals; they just have to go out and do the work.”

By 2008, a study by J-Lab (the Institute for Interactive Journalism) reported that more than one thousand community-based websites were in operation, posting citizen stories on local government, police, and city development. This represented twice the number of community sites from a year earlier. J-Lab also operates the Knight Citizen News Network, “a Web site that advises citizens and traditional journalists on how to launch and operate community news and information sites” (Deagon, 2008). In 2009, “a multi-university team of academics” examined “60 of the most highly regarded citizen sites identified by nationally known experts in new media” (Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2010b). While the study found that “a number of these sites individually revealed some impressive work,” the funding and “resources to provide these services at the same level of full news operations, day-in and day-out, do not exist, at least as of now” (Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2010b). The report also found “fairly limited levels of new content,” many sites that were not very transparent about funding and daily operations, and policies were “no more likely to encourage citizen postings” than traditional commercial news media sites” (Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2010b). The bottom line: in 2010, citizen journalism sites – many started by disaffected print reporters in league with ordinary citizens and amateur journalists – did not yet have the resources to provide the kind of regional news coverage that local newspapers once provided.

Nevertheless, in these sites Lemann sees the possibilities for new kinds of news narratives on the Internet. “Potentially, it is the best reporting medium ever invented,” he has said.

Back in 2006, recognizing the “new balance of power” emerging between “big media” and engaged citizens, Jay Rosen (2006) noted that corporate media no longer own the press; instead, it “is now divided into pro and amateur zones.”

New News Narratives and Implications for Journalism Education

So in this world where there are fewer professionals and more amateurs, where newsroom staffs decline at the moment when more online content is needed, how does journalism education adjust? What do we teach our students about living and working in a new partisan era, where punditry trumps expertise? What are the possibilities for new and better forms of news? In the face of all the unverified rhetoric and partisan opinion, journalism needs to imagine new ways to tell both individual and institutional stories – to invent story forms that are as complex and compelling as the times we live in.

In The Elements of Journalism, Kovach and Rosenstiel (2007) argue that “the primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing” (p. 13). Today, this guiding principle has been derailed. First, with the Internet and 24/7 news services, there is much more undocumented opinion masquerading as news, pushing aside credible information. In a world engulfed in so many media outlets, journalists and the pundit enterprises may be producing too much decontextualized information and too many insignificant stories. According to social critic Neil Postman (1995), by the mid-1990s society had developed an “information glut” as a result of developments in media technology, transforming news and information into “a form of garbage” (p. 35). Postman believed that scientists, technicians, managers, and journalists had piled up mountains of new data, which added to the problems of everyday life. As a result, too much unchecked data, too little thoughtful discussion, and too few good stories emanated from too many channels of communication. A second, related problem suggests that the amount of information the media now provide has made little impact on improving social and political life. In fact, many people feel cut off from our major institutions, including journalism. As the citizen journalism movement attests, people are looking for ways to take part in public conversations and civic debates – to renew a democracy in which many voices participate.

Although newspapers and their online sites remain the strongest source for good reporting, critics have raised a number of concerns about their future. For instance, have news stories become so formulaic and brief that they actually discourage new approaches to telling stories and reporting news? Another criticism is that many one-newspaper cities cover only issues and events of interest to middle- and upper-middle-class readers, thereby underreporting the issues that affect working-class and poor citizens. There has also been a downturn in stories that address readers as citizens and members of communities, and an upsurge in information that regards audiences primarily as savvy consumers, private individuals, and focus groups.

Journalists in the nineteenth century gained economic independence by freeing themselves from political party subsidies. That independence was increasingly compromised in the twentieth century as large entertainment corporations, like Disney and News Corporation, bought up mainstream news outlets. But in this new partisan era, where opinion blogging and 24/7 talking heads are much cheaper than maintaining news bureaus and sending reporters out to document what is actually going on in the world, the major threat to journalism may be the triumph of the “journalism of assertion.” For news to move forward in the age of the Internet, with its fragmented audience, publishers and owners need to invest in reporters and substantive reporting – in the “journalism of verification.” Kovach and Rosenstiel (2007) argue that “journalists must make the significant interesting and relevant” (p. 187). Yet too often on cable and the Internet we are awash in “journalism” that tries to make something significant out of the obviously trivial, mildly interesting, or narrowly relevant – like stories about troubled celebrities, attention-seeking politicians, or decontextualized stock market numbers.

For those of us who teach journalism and work in journalism, opportunities abound. We can teach students to break free from static older formulas – especially in TV news – and reimagine new ways to tell stories. In fictional TV, for example, storytelling has evolved over time, becoming increasingly dynamic and complex. Comparing the 1970s mega-hit TV show Dallas to more recent shows like The West Wing, Alias, The Sopranos, and 24, Stephen Johnson (2005) argued that “one of the most complex social networks on popular television in the seventies looks practically infantile next to the social networks of today's hit dramas” (p. 115). So if fictional storytelling has evolved, why has TV news remained entrenched in old formulas and time constraints that are virtually unchanged over the past 40 years? Why has 60 Minutes' 45-year-old detective formula for news magazines remained the standard for doing long-form TV news? Aren't there other ways to tell stories? It is no wonder young people are looking to The Daily Show, blog sites, citizen journalism, and social network venues for news and information. Perhaps they want something to match the more complicated storytelling around them, in everything from TV dramas to interactive videogames to their own conversations. The world has grown more complicated and we as citizens should demand significant news stories that better represent that complexity than formulaic 1:30-minute TV news packages sketching stories of little consequence.

One key narrative strategy that journalism students should learn is how to move from the individual to the social in their stories – from the merely interesting to the truly significant, from a small illustration to the big picture. It isn't enough to just tell the story of an out-of-work father or a struggling family living in a cheap hotel after losing their home to foreclosure. The individual characters in these kinds of stories can serve the narrative as a way into a more ambitious story. They are the “hook” that allows reader and viewers to identify, as individuals, with other individuals. But they are also catalysts for moving the story to the social level, presenting broad data on joblessness or on foreclosures and using experts to document local and national trends. These kinds of complex narratives are now easier to do since online journalism has solved the space constraints of print news and time limits of broadcast news. Journalism students need to learn how to tell more complicated stories, ones that provide context and more adequately address substantive social issues in which larger audiences have a stake. This type of complicated storytelling also serves readers by not implying that individuals in news stories are the sole agents for fixing their circumstances. Joblessness and foreclosures are not just a personal crisis for an individual or one family but social problems whose solutions require collective action.

Another important strategy for championing better journalism – a “journalism of verification” that covers stories of real social significance – is to encourage commercial–nonprofit partnerships between newsrooms and universities, as Downie and Schudson (2009) have advocated. This is what some call a “pro-am” model: a partnership between professional newsrooms and amateur students. Journalism students should no longer be writing just for their teachers; in an online world hungry for content, they should be writing for newsrooms and covering their communities. The Poynter Institute offers several strategies for successful news organization and university partnerships. For example, the journalism school at NYU has partnered with the New York Times to cover “hyperlocal” news for the East Village in Manhattan. The faculty member in charge, an ex-Times reporter, works with a Times metro editor to edit and ensure the quality of the students' work. In a second example, the Bay Citizen has partnered with the UC-Berkeley business and journalism schools “to develop a ‘test kitchen’ for innovation and experimentation in journalism” (Jean, 2010).

At Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, the small liberal arts-based journalism program has partnered with the media giant Cox Communication and its southwest Ohio operation, which includes four dailies, four weeklies, and commercial radio and TV stations in Dayton. The partnership has a long-range plan to relocate the editor of the local weekly paper, the Oxford Press, to a campus office near the journalism faculty and writing/editing labs. There that person will supervise interns (the paper no longer has any full-time reporters) and co-direct with a faculty member a regional news service dedicated to special projects that many newsrooms in the area no longer have the resources to produce. The students will write news stories either through special classes set up to execute specific Cox projects or through particular assignments arranged with Cox.

Finally, despite the cynics who say a degree in journalism is worthless, students recognize its value. At Miami University, the journalism program is not in a professional school but instead housed in an arts and science college. It also requires a second major. Journalism is considered part of the humanities at Miami, and the Journalism 101 course counts toward a student's general education plan; course instructors teach the history of journalism and its role in democracy, as well as introducing students to basic news reporting and writing skills. The program is also partnering on a data visualization project with statistics and graphic design faculty to help students write better narratives about numbers that require graphs and charts that should tell their own complex stories. The majority of students in the program do not go into journalism, but they like the double major requirement for its breadth; they want a field that will improve their writing and storytelling; they seek internships in news media, public relations, and publishing to see what kind of work they want to do; and they prefer to know something about how the best news media operate. Good journalism requires traits that are found in good scholarship – verification, documentation, and interviewing as foundational for any good story or report. In this new partisan era, overloaded with decontextualized information and undocumented punditry, these skills are more important than ever. The best journalists, like the best scholars, are imaginative and innovative; they match the appropriate story or report to the experience they are trying to verify. They invent new narrative and reporting forms when old formulas are failing. They also continue journalism's democratic traditions: documenting and interpreting the importance of events, keeping watch over our central institutions, and telling a community's significant stories in compelling ways. This is the kind of journalism that will save and sustain the profession, along with the critical role it plays in the democratic process – no matter how bad the economy gets, no matter how fractured the marketplace, and no matter how many newspapers are displaced by online alternatives.

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