If Everyone Voted . . .

Clarence Page has a column riffing off a study I discussed in some detail recently, about what Democrats and Republicans know (or don't know) about current affairs and political issues.  The Page column goes further, however, in connecting what people know with voting and breaking partisan deadlock by expanding the electorate with more moderate folks.

The column itself is worth reading and his argument, while a bit simplistic, makes perfectly good sense.  Of course it can't happen here, unlike Australia, but if everyone was required by law to vote, it would result in a more balanced electorate -- if by balanced you mean a whole lot of folks forced to vote who really don't give a damn and don't care and are largely indifferent (which is very very different than being independent or non-partisan).

So should everyone be required to vote?  Only if everyone is required to read a good newspaper.  As Gore Vidal said: "Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half."

Newspapers vs TelevisionJournalism vs Public Relations

Okay, this chart below says it all.  I trended newspapers and television in books scoured by Google's new ngram viewer.  It's not a great reproduction, this image, but as you can see the red (television) intersects with newspapers (blue) in the late 1960s, at least in mentions in books scanned by Google. 

Okay, that was fun.  What else can we do?  My colleagues down the hall will love this one.  Below I look at journalism (blue) versus public relations (red).  I find it fascinating that PR cranked it up in the 1950s and 1960s, in book mentions, and then slipped back again.  Why?  Some smart PR professor will no doubt let us know, or maybe do some research to explain this odd burst of attention that later slips back.

How People Know about Local Stuff

When it comes to covering local, that bad old MSM (mainstream media) remains a force.  Most local news continues to originate with the traditional media, according to this new report that closely examines the "news ecosystem" of one market -- Baltimore.

According to the report:

And of the stories that did contain new information nearly all, 95%, came from traditional media—most of them newspapers. These stories then tended to set the narrative agenda for most other media outlets.

Where the hell are the bloggers? 

Science Writing

Newspaper science writing is "going out of existence," according to one report, and that's bad news because soon what people know about science will come from such brainiac experts as Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.  If you haven't felt fear before, you should now.

Several mainstream news organizations in recent years have let go of their science reporters and done away with their science sections altogether. The science section of The New York Times, which is one of the few left in the country, features more health-related stories and fewer hard-science stories than it used to, said [Natalie] Angier, a Pulitzer Prize winner.

In a nation that struggles with basic science knowledge, that means what people know about science will only get worse. For those who drank the Kool-Aid and think the new world of blogs and various online sources will make things better -- pfffft.  It won't.  Not for most everyday people.  Instead we'll have pseudo-science ruling the day, and we'll all be worse off for it.

Yeah, the public likes science, but affect (emotion) and knowledge are very different bowls of red syrupy sugary drink.  After all, only 47 percent of Americans know electrons are smaller than atoms.  Yup, I'm reeeaaal optimistic, as science writing disappears.

Paperless Big City

What's it mean when a big city loses its metro paper? 

A good column gives one point of view, but the subhead says it all:  job loss, unwatched local government, and rising cultural illiteracy.  What people won't know is obvious, what the bad guys are up to.

News by Youth

We talk a lot in the news biz about attracting and keeping a young audience, but here's a case of a couple of fairly young people taking over a small newspaper -- a pair of 22-year-olds.  Cool.

News, Opinion, and the old Editorial Page

Since the age of dinosaurs, newspapers have had "opinion" or "editorial" pages. Readers would find "institutional editorials" to represent the opinion of the paper, "columns" to represent opinions of individuals (often journalists), "letters-to-the-editor" to represent readers, and an "editorial cartoon" to represent art-as-opinion.

News dominated the "A-section" and theoretically was devoid of opinion by journalists, but near the end of the front section you'd often find the editorial page -- and opinion.

TV news rarely included editorial opinion. A few local stations had some kook who'd come on at the end and share, but rarely did the networks do so (60 Minutes being an exception, but that was a news magazine, not a newscast).

We've reversed this approach.

Now, opinion seems to be the "A-section" of most cable news programming, with a little news tucked in here and there. Certainly that's the Fox News and MSNBC approach, and to a lesser degree (and less successfully) one pursued by CNN. Newspapers still have a front section and opinion pages, but the average reader looks at it and wonders "what's the difference?" True or not, it's a damn good question.

Bloggers often start with the assumption that there's no difference between news and opinion, that "truth" is the ultimate goal. As if journalists don't also try to get at "the best obtainable version of the truth." One of the differences is "obtainable." Journalists gather information, bloggers often react to information (yes, there are great exceptions to this, but I'm in no mood to get subtle, but yeah there are some damn good bloggers out there actually walking and talking and leaving the safety of their mom's basement to find stuff out).

The line between news and entertainment have blurred, not only in practice, but also in the minds of many Americans. The line between news and opinion? Same line. Blurred.

Is this a bad thing?

To old traditionally trained journalism guys like me, the answer should be YES! But I'm not so sure. I'm still wrestling with this, balancing the practical against the philosophical.

I now divide the world not into mainstream media and non-mainstream media, but into two other camps: Rational Media and Irrational Media. I'll get more into this dichotomy on another post, but rational is not merely in the eyes of the beholder. And I'm not entirely convinced my reasoning here won't unravel if one smart person tugs at a thread, but then again that's what this blog is for, to test ideas. But I'll give you a hint. Irrational Media include not only Fox News (easy) but also Jon Stewart. It includes Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity (easy), but it also includes others that will make conservatives and liberals angry. I'm a radical moderate, so it's not like I care.

Slate's News Experiment

Michael Kinsley of Slate poses this experiment: two journalists will spend one hour a day reading print newspapers, two will spend one hour a day getting their news online, but not shovelware or aggregators, so that leaves out Google News or Huffingtonpost but does include sites like Politico.

This goes for three days, then he gathers them back to discuss their experience. They're really doing this.

The headline for this piece reads Who's Better Informed, Newspaper Readers or Web Surfers? so I assume political learning is one of the examined outcomes, along with the overall experience, the frustrations, the good and bad, and of course the ugly, of getting news in more or less one fashion.

Let's set the record straight. This "highly unscientific experiment," as Kinsley calls it, is highly unscientific to the point of being silly. It's more of a vaguely interesting gimmick than anything else.

There's one published study that looked at the differences between people who read the New York Times online versus those who read the paper version. This controlled experiment randomly assigned people to one of two groups (print vs. online of the Times) and examined differences in learning and other factors. Print came out ahead (I can't lay my hands on the link, but I'm fairly certain it ran in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly).

Any differences have to do with the way we read, the way we approach online versus ink on paper. It's more than mere differences of medium, it's differences of motivation. We simply approach a screen differently, almost at an unconscious level, and subtle differences emerge.

This is a bit more PhDweeby than Kinsley wants, of course. The gimmick study will be fun for the discussion that emerges, but beyond that the results are meaningless. After all, they're looking at very different sources AND very different media. That, budding methodologists, is a confound of confounding proportions.

The News and the Kindle DX

I've been playing a few days with the Kindle DX, the new larger Kindle from Amazon especially designed for students and newspaper readers. No, I didn't buy one. I'm one of three faculty with a grant that purchased some to study whether the gizmos have a chance to help newspapers.

I like the thing.

I've been reading the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which is nice since the AJC quit distributing it's dead-tree version to the Athens market a few months ago.

We'll be handing the tablets to people with a subscription to the AJC to study how appealing real people find this way of reading the news. In fact I emailed three major players at the AJC to see if they'd like to participate -- given we're studying their newspaper and they might find the results kinda important -- and I didn't get a single response. Not even a "no thanks." And they wonder why they're struggling. Sheesh.

Now that I've nailed the navigation, I really kinda like it for reading the newspaper. Not as much as I like printed paper, but it's okay. Bad side: only one update a day. Good side: I really don't want to look at my Kindle all day long. And I've yet to read a book on one, so I can't say much about that experience.

Will the Kindle save newspapers? I'm guessing not, but for a small, select audience -- one that loves reading and perhaps travels and needs to take one slim piece of hardware rather than lug a bunch of paperbacks -- this has promise of at least helping, of creating a small revenue stream. The bad news for papers is Amazon often asks for 70 percent or more of the small subscription fee.

How does this fit with what people know? Obviously, any increase in news consumption is good, and for me the Kindle has made available a lot of state news I missed, mainly because I'm not so much a fan of reading a web site for news beyond a check for updates. No, the Kindle is for people who immerse themselves in the reading experience, which leads to far more knowledge about public affairs than mere exposure to television. But for the Kindle to succeed people will need to see that it is good not just for news (which won't be enough of a draw) but also for other stuff, like books and magazines and whatever else they can squeeze into the thing.

But yeah, I kinda like it. Then again, I didn't have to spent over $400 to play with it.

Trusted News Sources

A June Gallup poll includes numbers in trust in newspapers and television news from 2006 through 2009. The findings?

• Trust in Television News has dropped slowly from 71 percent giving some positive comment to 64 percent in the latest survey.
• Trust in Newspapers has inched down but well within the margin of error, from 70 percent to 68 percent.

Meaning what?

A Pew Center report (scroll down a bit to "falling favorability" for the table) looks from 1985 to 2007. It's more specific (cable news, broadcast tv news, etc.). Most media outlets drop here, from newspapers to local tv news. The biggest drops are by national newspapers and cable news.

How do we reconcile the two? In part they ask somewhat different questions, in part the Pew breaks TV news down to its various parts such as cable (CNN, Fox, etc.), in part it may even be time (Pew goes from 1985 to 2007, Gallup from 2006 to 2009). Maybe something has changed recently, a frustration with cable TV news now become somewhat more partisan due to a fragmenting audience -- that's a pretty good bet, but it hard to say, and I didn't have time to scour Pew for newer media favorability numbers.

And then there's the question as to whether "believability" or "credibility" or "favorability" matter for news organizations. As a former journalist I used to believe that if I wasn't pissing someone off, I wasn't doing my job right. And I tell my own reporting students that if they want to be loved, be a kindergarten teacher, not a journalist. Those who dislike the news the most are often those who consume it the greatest, a love-hate relationship that at times makes absolutely no sense, at least on the surface.

Will the Kindle Save the News?

The Kindle 2 is that neat bit of lightweight tablet technology put out by Amazon that'll let you read books, magazines, and newspapers. So I have to wonder, will the Kindle (or readers like it) save the news?

The math is bad. It's expensive to collect the news (opinion is cheap, but news is expensive). The decoupling of advertising from news, especially for newspapers, is causing serious cuts in newsrooms across the country. Less news is getting reported, because let's face it, nearly all the news out there is generated by newspapers. In part people don't like reading paper, so you have to wonder if the Kindle can help. We're going to test just that soon as part of a study, so I'll report back, but if we can find a way to "iPod" the news then perhaps we can also salvage political knowledge.

I'm hopeful, but not convinced. A systematic study will tell us more than people blathering opinions on blogs (er, kinda like what I'm doing now).

A Major Called "Newspapers"

I'm gonna stray a bit off the what people know track.

I teach in the Department of Journalism, yet we don't have a major called journalism. Instead we have three majors: newspapers, magazines, and publication management. Anyone with a clue about the changing dynamics of the news business realizes having a major called newspapers makes about as much sense a business school having a major called convenience store management. We teach journalism, not newspapers, not magazines. We teach it for dead trees and online and all the rest. Journalism is a verb, something you do.

And yes, turf protection rears its ugly little head. No place is so petty as academe. We don't want to upset anyone by having a major called journalism in what coincidentally is a Department of Journalism. Extend this brilliant line of thought to its logical and deeply disturbed conclusion and you can complain about Department of English having a major called English -- because, after all, many of us use English. Dammit, how dare they claim it!

Let the brainiacs run free and you arrive at only one possible answer -- we change our name to the Department of Newspapers and Magazines.

So can I drag this vent, kicking and screaming, back to a what people know discussion? Probably not well, though of course our curriculum influences what skills students have when they enter the market, which influences how news is produced, which influences what people learn about their social and political world. So yeah, all of this petty crap does make an indirect difference.

Except not, because we still have a major called newspapers. We're roaring fearlessly into the 1950s.

The Kindle is Kool

Colleague Dean Krugman showed me his Kindle 2 this morning and now I suffer from serious techno envy.

Yeah, that's all well and good, but how does it fit my blog on what people know? Well, you can read magazines and newspapers on the thing, not just mysteries and SF and novels about puppies or vampires or whatever. That's the potential -- a way to keep up with the news without paper and without being stuck with a desktop or even an annoying laptop computer.

I admit $350 is too much. It's gotta come down. But here in Athens the Atlanta newspaper will soon stop delivery at my driveway, and they also happen to deliver the NYTimes. So if I want to read the Times and not do it on my computer, this has potential. The Kindle is really best for people who travel, kinda like laptops when they first came out, but I'm at home now typing on a laptop because we have no desktops in the house. Why bother? They take up valuable space, so we have wireless and laptops and can work wherever the hell we please.

With the Kindle, I can read anything I want, wherever I please. That's the potential, once they get the cost down just a smidgen. And when that happens, I hope it means news and information will once again move to the front of the bus.

Pew and Headlines

I love the headline of a recent Pew Center report:

An End to Religion, Newspapers
and the American Way of Life

Just about sums it up for me, an unrepentant newspaper guy, but what this reflects is what bloggers were discussing in a week of content. As the report says:

As the economy struggled, a major newspaper shut down and a survey highlighted the diminishing appeal of organized religion, bloggers and social media pondered the dramatic social changes that might be taking place and what the implications could be.

Below is a graphic display:

Newspapers and Political Engagement

Excellent blog today by Alan Mutter about a case study of what happens when a city loses a daily newspaper. The gist? Political engagement (voting) decreases. A PDF of the study is here. An important part of what people know, or in this case, what they no longer get to know because of a daily paper going away.

Summing Up IV

This the fourth in (maybe) five installments this week to sum up what we know about the relationship between media use and political knowledge. Monday it was TV news, Tuesday entertainment faux news programs, Wednesday I discussed radio.

Today -- newspapers.

You know, those smushed-tree and ink things they quaintly toss on driveways in your neighborhood. That old guy down the street, he gets one. Hobbles out every morning in his robe, stoops down and groans while farting, hobbles back to his kitchen table to suck down coffee and figure out what the hell happened in the world yesterday.

That's a newspaper -- yesterday's news tomorrow.

I love papers. I worked at three daily newspapers in my unstellar journalism career. Covered cops and courts and politics and government and schools and a bunch of other stuff. Took pix. Wrote features. Even did some obits. Had a helluva time, but that's all beside the point here, which is how do newspapers fit in with political knowledge.

If you read previous studies you find this nice, modest, statistically significant relationship between reading the newspaper and what people know. In part this can be explained by the demographics of newspaper readers: older, more interested, more educated. In part this can be explained by the way we approach print as an active process versus how we approach the screen, a more passive process. In part it's the depth of information on a newspaper's front page and inside pages, far more than you get from TV. The old saying was that you'd find as much info on the front page of a newspaper than in 20 minutes of TV, and that's kinda true and kinda false, but it's also beyond our discussion here.

BUT ... and this is a major but, the way newspaper journalists tend to write stories, via the inverted pyramid, makes it difficult for young or uninterested readers to figure out what the hell is going on. A summary lede is fine and I love it dearly, but it sucks for some readers who do not have the context or background knowledge to understand what it's talking about.

Now here I'm talking the paper version, not the online version, but there's a cool study that compared the same exact NYT story in print and on a screen. They measured knowledge from reading the same exact story. And found ... (drum roll please) ... that people learned more from the print version. Holy dominance of print, Batman! Why? I believe again that it has everything to do with the way we approach a printed product versus one on the screen (or boob tube). There is some work to support this.

Anyway, put newspaper exposure into a multivariate model, control for all the other usual suspects in predicting political knowledge, and you'll often find newspaper reading still holds some significance. Small, modest, but often statistically significant at that magical p<.05.

But as newspaper reading drops, and online grazing replaces it, we'll see these relationships disappear in future studies.

Why? Because people will say they read newspapers online, but that exposure will reflect grazing that we all tend to do online versus a deeper, longer soak we tend to do on paper, and also will reflect the seriousness we read a paper product versus a screen product. In the long run, the relationship between "reading news" and political knowledge will -- in my humble estimation -- disappear.

Watch for it.

Saving the Non-Paper Paper?

For decades we've listened to chatter about tablets and e-paper, ways to read the news in a simple, clear, portable manner. The Kindle 2 is really for book reading (I want one, btw, if you're shopping for me). And here's a piece on e-readers of the next generation aimed less at books and more at magazines and newspapers. It could have a huge impact in the success of print news, which is in turn a major factor in what people know.

In the "I couldn't say it better myself" category, a blog (and reference to magazine article) about the death of newspapers.

Really. If you hate political corruption, or love newspapers, or both, read this.

Newsroom Cuts, and Bagels Too

My local daily newspaper announced cuts, including five jobs out of a newsroom that could use 15 more people to adequately cover the University of Georgia, Athens, and its surrounding counties. Just another sign of the financial times, and yet I wonder about all the stories that will be missed out there -- the misdeeds of politicians and cronies, the businesses getting away with murder, and I suppose murder itself.

What we'll know about our community has been significantly harmed, all to service debt and feed the profit margin beast.

The paper will get slimmer, the price will probably go up, and the brainiacs and bean counters will wonder why circulation continues to drop. It's like McDonald's serving burgers cold and wondering why people stopped buying them.

Even my favorite local bagel place is closing at the end of the week. I plan on having lunch there today to see it off.

Why are the two related?

Simple. Zim's was a kind of community meeting place. If you visited in the mornings you'd see groups of people who often gather there to drink coffee, nibble a bagel, and share their lives with one another. Sorority girls, retirees, journalism professors who blog too much, you'd see them and a host of others at the cool custom-designed tables, chatting and eating and creating one of those "third places" where people visit and connect.

A good newspaper is kinda like that, or used to be. In some ways the Internet has blown up geographic communities and replaced them with communities of shared interests regardless of where one lives. That's good, and that's bad. We need both kinds of communities, but interest in news is hurting, at least the traditional way we provide news, and I'm not all that convinced that a sense of geographic community isn't also disappearing.

Today, I'm reading the Athens Banner-Herald in paper form. And I'm eating a bagel at Zim's.

Newsless in Missouri

An interesting piece about the intensive following of the traditional news and yet not feeling informed.

I’m beginning to question an assumption I’ve never really articulated, but always held. I’ve long assumed that if you followed the news, the stories behind the headlines would become plain. By reading your newspaper over time, you’d develop a high-level understanding of the issues. You’d have an idea of the characters involved, the dilemmas at hand, the consensus facts, etc. You’ll be armed with the information you need to make decisions on how to advance your society.

Read it through. Yes, reading the NYTimes helped him feel he understood national and international issues, but what he says has a great deal of truth to it, that reading local journalism, even okay local journalism, sometimes by its very nature leaves one feeling -- uninformed. In part he suggests this has to do with the way we tell news stories, and I have to agree. I've watched my own teenagers struggle to make sense of issues by reading my own local or my metro daily papers. We (the royal journalistic we) tell stories in such a way that suggests people already understand the background, which sometimes finds its way at the end of the story, not the beginning where some people need it. And "balance" often results in no real answer to the problem.

Ask people why they like The Daily Show and one thing that often comes up is, it tells the truth. By challenging assumptions, by pointed (and funny) questions, Jon Stewart often gets at truths that the nature of traditional journalism often does not allow.

And this guy is Matt Thompson, a serious news guy tied to Poynter and a major journalism program. His site, Newsless, is worth the read. Take the time to visit. He has an interesting response today to criticism that what he's describing is just bad journalism, not journalism. As he says near the end of today's piece:

What I’m saying is that I think those standards — the benchmarks of success systemic to journalism — are misguided.