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THE COLLEGIATE JOURNALIST - - Fall 2006, Volume 36, Issue 1

Speech to Biennial SCJ National Convention, Valdosta State University
Journalism’s New Trajectory: Meeting New Challenges with Core Values
By Michael J. Roberts
March 3, 2006

Thank you for your invitation and your generous welcome.

I look over this room and see the future of our craft, eager minds applied to disciplines I can’t imagine.

I see educators who perform and apply the research that will move journalism solidly into the new millennium.

And I see all of you looking expectantly at the dumbest guy in the room, waiting for him to say something interesting.

Frank (Barnas) invited me here on the strength of my status as one of the few local “Recount 2000” veterans still working in Tallahassee. That’s a rather dubious honor, a lot like being the tallest building in Dubuque. But it’s a fun time to remember, and I’ll share some of those recollections.

I’d also like to talk not just about where we’ve been, but where we’re headed as a craft and some challenges we must overcome to get there. And I’d like to add a caution about how “old media” indulgences can dilute the value of the “New Journalism” you’ll create.

The late U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill was fond of saying, “All politics is local.” To a large extent, that’s true of news as well.

Most of us will spend our careers in local newsrooms. But the voracious appetites of the “big” media now make it increasingly likely that some story we cover will go national.

In the year 2000, though, reporters in Tallahassee got to see that flow go the other direction when the Constitution came to town.

The morning of November 7th portended an easy day: just a few obligatory stories about voter turnout, last minute exhortations by the state parties, interviews with first-time voters – you get the picture. Besides, November is a sweeps month and, like most TV stations, we had numerous series pieces prepared in advance. One of them that night would occupy more than two minutes of our six o’clock broadcast.

The producer of our five o’clock show, in which most state and national news was covered, was seeing some indications of unrest at the polls in South Florida, but nothing to indicate the size and intensity of the gathering storm – a few polling places opening late, voters being assigned to the wrong precincts, that sort of thing.

All we had to do was fill an hour-and-a-half, then the air belonged to the network from six-thirty until the last polls closed and the last pundit spoke. But by eight PM the Associated Press and at least two major networks were calling Florida a Gore state. Later, the networks took it back and, shortly after midnight, were giving Florida to Bush.

Many of us went to bed that night believing that George W. Bush was the undisputed winner, albeit narrowly.

Most of the nation’s newspapers went to bed that night with the same presumption. The New York Post hit the streets in the early morning hours with a “Bush Wins” banner. The paper was later recalled, but untold hundreds are probably in the hands of collectors. The Columbus Dispatch had the same headline – changed, no doubt to some editor’s later regret, from its original: “Too Close to Call.” The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer apparently tried to strike a balance: “It’s Bush – Barely.”

Gore called Bush to concede, then – after watching more of the counting – he called back and retracted it.

And according to Florida law, because the candidates were within one-half of one percent of each other, there would be a mandatory recount. On the morning of November 8th, television viewers in market 109 awoke to find lawyers in Italian suits flying lazy circles over the capitol.

Former U.S. Secretary of State James Bakker had arrived to coordinate the Bush efforts, and former Secretary of State Warren Christopher was in Tallahassee on behalf of Al Gore.

Soon-to-be-famous Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris addressed the media. She explained Florida’s election certification process, including an agonizing ten-day wait for absentee ballots from overseas.

We had drama, and we were giddy – this was a ratings period, remember? Sleek black limos racing through the night to save the republic, Peter Jennings calling on our tip line and, most important, a capital city full of political junkies hanging on our every word. We sighed aloud: if only this could stretch for a full two weeks, we’d have the book just about knocked.

Be careful what you wish for.

As we sorted through that first day’s barrage of opinions and procedures and legal posturing, we discovered our learning curve to be an almost impossible slope. We had a newsroom full of small-market generalists who, frankly, were unaccustomed to such specialized work so far above the political timberline. For twenty-four hours or so we were lurching around in thin air, a little unsure of our footing.

And we got a bit “star struck.” The world’s supply of satellite trucks swarmed a state parking lot across from the capitol, and America's top national TV talent stood shoulder-to-shoulder on a broken sidewalk that had become the Navel of the Universe. Some of our folks would drive down after work just to watch.

But the story was as invigorating as it was intimidating, and everybody wanted to be a part of it: part-time production assistants were volunteering to join our field crews to carry tripods or shuttle tapes or set lights for our own live shots. Reporters who ordinarily would have been dragged kicking and screaming to political stories were scrambling to find angles on this one to call their own. Our producers were pestering their network counterparts with offers of tape for sidebars they might like.

And for all that enthusiasm, I had a tough time getting people to cover the news.

Consider Thursday, November 9th:

Florida’s attorney general was conducting an investigation because twenty-two Floridians had died, one of them in fiery crash in Tallahassee, after their Firestone tires had suffered catastrophic failures at high speeds; Firestone was recalling six-and-a-half million of them...

A local police officer was arrested and fired for fondling a sixteen-year-old girl...

A female inmate was raped at gunpoint in jail by a sheriff’s captain – the same man who was the object of a federal civil rights investigation for forcing a co-worker to have sex...

I was on the assignment desk that day, and nobody wanted to cover those stories! I suspect it’s because they wouldn’t look as good on a resume tape as a standup from the galactic center.

But we found our focus by remembering that the strength of local television is to be local. On that same Thursday, we followed a harried court administrator as he scrambled to reschedule trial and free-up courtrooms for election-related wrangling. We followed hundreds of university students as they marched on the capitol in protest of the electoral disarray. We found a local man who’d been sent two voter registration cards, two days apart, instructing him to vote in two different precincts. And that’s the day the Gore campaign asked for a hand recount in four South Florida counties.

Of course we were frequent visitors to local, state and federal courtrooms as the arguments rose and fell: which votes, from which counties, should or would be recounted? And how? And by what deadline? We shot video of spectators spending the night on the steps of the Florida Supreme Court to be guaranteed seats at its proceedings.

I remember November 14th for two reasons: it was the first time in five days that Katherine Harris appeared in public, and it’s the day we went into the hospitality business.

Constitutional crisis or no, in four days the Seminoles and Gators would be playing just down the street in Doak Campbell Stadium. A substantial number of an estimated 82-thousand fans were claiming their hotel rooms at the expense of the ladies and gentlemen of the world’s media. And for all we’d like to mythologize about media coverage of the recount, consider that some counting of our own revealed that the sportswriters and broadcasters outnumbered the election media two-to-one. ABC alone brought a 45-person crew.

Not only did we cover that story, the station became a participant, pairing itinerant reporters in need of lodging with local residents willing to open their homes. Yankees, Midwesterners and journalists from France, Great Britain and Spain all got a firsthand taste of Southern hospitality. For some it came at a price: fliers circulating around town advertised rooms for three-hundred, five-hundred and even a thousand dollars per night.

Meanwhile, county business was grinding to a halt as paparazzi clogged the courthouse halls. They would stand for hours waiting for even the smallest events related to the recount. Ordinary civilians filing papers for things like small claims actions found themselves in a constellation of flashbulbs and floodlights, mistaken for political operatives.

Tempers began to flare.

On frantic days, crews from the networks were pushy…or maybe it was just that local news crews didn’t move out of their way fast enough. On most days, residents complained that the media were clogging the roads downtown…or maybe it was just the locals themselves rubbernecking. On a particularly bad day, Fox News reporter Sheppard Smith knocked a local female news producer down with his car, claiming she was standing in his parking space…or maybe that was Shep on a good day. As far as I know, he managed never to return to face charges.

Good and bad, a full thirty-six days passed before the Supreme Court of the United States halted the recount. George W. Bush won Florida by 537 votes, we went back to our regular beats and “W” went to the White House January 20th.

As newly-fledged national news veterans, some of our reporters and videographers went to better jobs. Good for them. At our core, we’re really just slightly-better-dressed migrant labor. Absent a steady stream of promotions, local media salaries rise only when accompanied by a market jump.

The rest of us were left to ruminate on our experience, and we concluded that part of the reason it was ultimately so much fun is that we really had it easy. We didn’t have to find the story, it found us. In spite of long hours, cold coffee and stale French fries, all we really had to do was attend scheduled events – hearings, press conferences and court rulings.

Sure, we kept our eyes open for the quirky sidebars and candid moments that humanized the story, but for the most part our little local team did it just like the big boys: every evening we pointed live cameras at reporters in the field and let them ad-lib their way into video of the latest development, earnestly concluding that it was important because it had just happened.

In retrospect, much of what we were reporting had no bearing on the ultimate outcome. On November 10th, less than three full days into the whole mess, the Associated Press put down its calculators and declared Bush ahead by 327 votes. Out of millions of votes cast and thousands contested, they were short by just 210. After that, it was just a month’s worth of very exciting futility.

And that was the month we learned really to love the live shot. It was a capability we’d used occasionally, but in November 2000 we were way over the top. We did them a lot and we made the discovery that almost every local station makes: they’re not that tough, they look cool, and they rev-up the story’s energy level by several orders of magnitude. Besides, Shep Smith and all the rest were doing them, sometimes eight or ten a day.

We were beguiled.

I’m glad to say that since then our ardor has cooled considerably and we’re more circumspect about their appropriateness. But nationwide, the live shot has become emblematic of the hyperbole to which local television newsrooms have become addicted. While warranted in legitimate breaking news situations, live shots are now the darlings of producers in search of a cure for the mundane.

About twenty years ago some Canadian broadcasters came up with a style of news video they called, “disturbing the screen.” It consisted of camera shots usually associated with motion simulation rides: trombone zooms, swish pans and Hitchcock-like camera tilts. It was their response to the “disturbing” realization that in most households, the television set is just a lamp with sound.

Flicking-on the tube when we get home in the evening is a conditioned reflex. Somehow, changing clothes, feeding the cats and cooking dinner are just not properly experienced without background chatter. The challenge for evening news producers is to get you to stop what you’re doing and actually pay attention.

But we risk coming across as self-indulgent.

Instead of attracting you with content, it’s possible for TV producers to lure you with technology: swoopy graphics and urgent music to billboard each story, dramatic video bumps to tease upcoming reports…and of course, gratuitous live shots.

Technology can be a remarkable tool, but it is not a mandate. It has the power to enhance, but too often it is used just to hype. The gizmos that could make us better storytellers are becoming a substitute for good storytelling.

The irony is that our love of technology is unrequited. According to the numbers, it doesn’t seem to be working.

The Holy Grail of the television economy resides in the attention spans of viewers aged 18 to 49, a pretty techno-savvy group. The marching orders from the front office of every American television station are simple: attract and enlarge that audience so we can sell it to advertisers.

But the demographic we covet it the very demographic that’s rejecting us. Over the past fifteen years, its viewership of nightly network newscasts has slipped thirty percent. That represents eleven million viewers. For local news, the slippage is somewhat less severe but still alarming. It’s tough to crunch trends from five, five-thirty, six, ten and eleven into a single, solid number, but something between sixteen and nineteen percent seems about right.

That drop in viewership coincides with our big leap in technology.

Of course there are cultural factors in the decline of the nightly news. Longer commutes mean viewers just aren’t home to watch early shows, and at eleven our biggest competition is the sandman. But it seems we’ve reached a threshold beyond which technology no longer constitutes a meaningful attraction to our traditional “appointment newscast” platform. On its own, our infatuation with technology may not be what’s killing us, but we’re at a point at which it doesn’t seem especially helpful.

We may have to back away a bit from our love affair with style and cuddle back up with substance.

This is not to say we won’t embrace different technological platforms to reach our absent audiences. In fact, it’s not only inevitable, it’s underway. TV journalists now write blogs. Newspaper websites offer streaming video. NPR does podcasts.

For the past three months, television station WISC in Madison, Wisconsin has been pioneering full video newscasts to cell phones. On Wednesday of this week the Associated Press and Microsoft launched a new service that delivers free video news clips over the web, supported by shared advertising revenue. Apple has a new Video I-Pod, and I guarantee that right now someone is concocting a way for it to deliver television news.

In Fort Myers, Florida, The News-Press has created what it calls “MoJos” – “MObile JOurnalists” – who roam the city with digital cameras, MP3 recorders and wireless laptops, filing neighborhood stories directly to the paper’s website. It’s strictly micro-journalism: the location of speed traps, cat-up-a-tree, little league practice.

Journalism is being set on a new trajectory.

It’s conceivable that within a very few years, nightly newscasts will look more like infomercials for on-demand downloads. As newsrooms everywhere explore multi-platform models, print and broadcast journalists’ functions will become interchangeable. And as skeptical, fragmented audiences graze among new means of distribution, they will linger only at those truly worthy of their attention.

It will soon be up to you to command that attention and create that value in new information environments. And competition among new media will redefine what it means to be a journalist.

Keep in mind that we are practitioners of a craft, not members of a profession. There is no prescribed course of study, no state certification. We have no regulatory body and we swear no oath. We don’t even have a secret handshake. I have never seen anyone escorted out of a newsroom for practicing journalism without a license.

A journalist could be…anybody. Like Howard Stern.

In September 2003, the FCC ruled his show a “bona fide news interview program.” They were just extending the 1984 qualification they conferred upon Phil Donahue, and later on Sally Jessie Raphael, Jerry Springer and “Politically Incorrect.”

The fact that we are not certified members of a sanctioning profession certainly contributes to public suspicion.

Of course, we like to trumpet that we have a sort of federal charter. But the value of press freedom was not a founding principle of our republic, and it still seems to be in dispute.

Sure, in 1786 Thomas Jefferson said, “Our liberty cannot be guarded but by freedom of the press.” That was ten years after the Declaration of Independence, we were still under the articles of confederation, and the articles were silent on the subject. It would be another year before we’d have a constitution, and four more years before that Constitution had its First Amendment. 1791 was a long time coming.

And 215 years later, studies by The Freedom Forum demonstrate that support for the First Amendment is neither universal nor stable, and subject to public whim. It found that after 9-11, America was split 50-50 on whether the First Amendment guarantees too much freedom. Public sentiment took another three years to return to its pre-attack level: two-thirds in favor, the remainder still not so sure.

A McCormick Tribune survey released this week disclosed that Americans know more about the cartoon family, “The Simpsons,” than they do about the First Amendment. Only one-in-four can name more than one of the five freedoms the Amendment guarantees, but more than half can name at least two members of the family.

Ambivalence about the First Amendment is not confined to your parents and grandparents. It’s alive and well among your little brothers and sisters.

In 2005 the Knight Foundation published the results of a two-year survey of 100-thousand students in 544 high schools across the country. It was the most comprehensive study of its kind of young America’s attitudes toward the Amendment.

Just fifty-one percent said they believe newspapers should be able to publish freely without government review of stories. When read all forty-five words of it, more than a third said the Amendment “goes too far” in its guarantees. Remember, that duplicates The Freedom Forum’s findings for adults.

Considering what must be missing in high school, and what you might be hearing at home, I’m surprised Frank and Bill managed to assemble enough of you for a conference. Maybe they’re offering T-shirts.

However you slice it, there are threats to our craft from multiple quarters. Unable to police government leaks, the executive and judicial branches are coming after us as the easier targets.

For her connection with the Valerie Plame story, The New York Times’ Judith Miller went to jail, and Time magazine’s Matt Cooper nearly went with her. In Miller’s case it wasn’t even for something she’d written, but for something she was thinking about writing.

Providence, Rhode Island TV reporter Jim Taricani served six months of house arrest for legally broadcasting FBI video of a city official taking a bribe, but declining to disclose the source of his tape. That official was later convicted, but his status as a heart transplant patient was the only thing that kept Taricani from behind bars.

Collegiate journalism is in the thick of the First Amendment tussle, too.

By declining late last month to review a case from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court cleared the way for censorship of college newspapers in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.

In Hosty V. Carter, the 7th Circuit ruled last year that the Supreme Court’s 1988 Hazelwood decision, allowing school censorship from high school down to first grade, also applied upward to the Innovator, published by students at Illinois’ Governors State University.

Stung by critical stories and editorials, the school’s dean had halted publication in 2000 pending administration review of all future issues. Three student journalists sued the university in January 2001. Their loss last month potentially threatens not just student newspapers but all school-sponsored speech in the 7th Circuit. As regards future issues, the Innovator hasn’t been published in five years.

These assaults on traditional journalistic platforms may be directed at the nation’s new media as well.

The United States government seeks records of hundreds of thousands of internet searches as it investigates potential content restrictions. And four international internet service providers – Microsoft, Google, Cisco and Yahoo – have apparently been helping Beijing construct what’s being called “the great firewall of China.”

The group Reporters Without Borders claims Yahoo actually furnished information that helped identify and convict a Chinese journalist critical of human rights abuses there. If they quietly kow-tow to that government, I’m not so confident they wouldn’t knuckle-under to ours.

So here we stand, on ramparts that are in some places cracked and eroded, beckoned by a view of our broadest horizons yet. But more important that whatever we might see is what our audiences see in us.

For our privileged position on those Jeffersonian ramparts, they must witness our energetic defense of the First And Foremost Amendment.

They must enjoy a transparent view of work that is verifiable and impartial.

They must see us as partners in creating stable, adaptable, diverse communities.

And they must see us continue to innovate while avoiding technological self-indulgences that could detract from the authenticity of our content.

Forty-two years ago Marshall McLuhan warned that new technology creates unanticipated personal and social consequences simply by the way it expands the scale of our affairs.

I submit to you that the core value of journalism lies in how thoughtfully we add the weight of our words and images to that scale...as freedom hangs in the balance.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Michael J. Roberts