The Choice of a New Generation

The reading this week in the Social Role of the Mass Media class has primarily focused on cybermedia from the journalist’s point of view: ethics, legalities, mobile reporting, effective use of social media, verification, and so on.

But who’s consuming all of this cybermedia?  Of course, we know from weeks past it’s all of those Millennials, a fact highlighted in this piece from the Associated Press.

Independence Examiner (April 13, 1945).  Harry S. Truman Presidential Museum & 
Library.  Independence, Missouri.  Photographed by Stephen Milligan (June 28, 2014).

To maintain credibility, transparency, and all of those other honest, forthright characteristics of a good journalism teacher, I must admit I didn’t some across this story after hours of in-depth research for this class.  No, while I was trying to grade my way out from under a pile of papers in time for this week’s third marking period report card deadline, this article appeared in my e-mail inbox from none other than John, the lawyer who doesn’t watch local news but instead gets his news from Google and phone alerts—he of student bus driving fame (see my Week 6 blog post).

The story even uses Tom Rosenstiel as a source—he of Blur and The Elements of Journalism fame (see just about every week of this class).

The piece details the results of a survey showing most Millennials get their news online, mostly from cybermedia like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube.  The results also show this method of consumption is trickling up into older generations. And news consumers are using up to three or four cybermedia sites for their news.

Still, though, some of those who gather their news from social media have a use for newspapers and television, but they are growing tired of those talking heads spouting off opinions—bad news for those purveyors of journalism of affirmation.

Possibly another nail in affirmation journalism’s coffin: Well over half those who get their news via cybermedia say they subscribe to multiple viewpoints in their feeds.  If only everyone could or would be this open minded!

We can’t have our cybercake and eat it, too, though—most of those surveyed admit to receiving their news through passive consumption instead of actively seeking it out, attending to the stories that pop up in those feeds.  In teaching a new generation of students news literacy, journalism educators can stress the value of active consumption.

A little bit of icing on that cybercake is that even when respondents encountered news randomly on social media, some conducted further research into the topic of their own volition.  Healthy skepticism!  What better way to educate oneself and make an informed judgment?

And a big dollop of whipped cream on that cake: News consumption and cybermedia engagement are increasing in all age groups studied.  Surely this will lead to a more informed, engaged populace

Perhaps there is hope for this new generation—and for the generations ahead of it.

Palmetto Pride

How could I let this week pass without acknowledging—nay, basking in—the pride I and many other South Carolinians have in our former governor, Mark Sanford, who set the example for good health and outdoor tourism with his penchant for walking the Appalachian Trail?

And now, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have immortalized Sanford in their text Blur as a cautionary tale—oops, I mean…example…of how interview subjects are booked for television news programs.

South Carolina State House.  Columbia, South Carolina.  1855.  
Greek Revival style.  National Register of Historic Places 
(June 5, 1970).  National Historic Landmark (May 11, 1976).  
Photographed by Stephen Milligan (June 21, 2010). 

Just as Sanford had jetted off to Argentina for a week to court his mistress, upon returning to his job as leader of the Palmetto State, he was immediately courted by television news outlets to come onto their programs to tell his tale of tortured love—mostly on his own terms or with promises of sympathetic interviewers, according to the e-mail messages Charleston’s newspaper, The Post and Courier, snagged through the Freedom of Information Act.

Talk about adding insult to injury!  It’s bad enough the man cheated on his wife, abandoned his job for a week, abandoned his four sons the week of Father’s Day, and lied about the whole mess (there’s that Palmetto Pride showing again), but then he has media franchises clamoring to have him as a guest so he can explain away the whole thing (wait, Palmetto Pride is an organization dedicated to fight litter in South Carolina…how appropriate—I’ll leave that reference in).

I remember Gov. Sanford’s 2009 walk well—I was in Springfield, Illinois, at the time, participating in a fellowship to study Abraham Lincoln for a week.  With only one teacher from each state, as the lone South Carolinian, I was the center of attention the morning the story broke.  A day or two later, the lady from Ohio even accused Sanford of having Michael Jackson killed to deflect attention from his escapades. 

Even more embarrassment—now South Carolina will forever be linked in some minds to the death of the King of Pop!

As a journalism teacher, there is something here to truly be proud of—the investigative reporting (see how I worked that other topic of discussion from this week in) of Gina Smith, The State newspaper reporter who drove four hours to Atlanta in the middle of the night to greet Sanford as he stepped off the airplane at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport that morning—to avoid the Columbia airport, of course.  Smith had gotten a tip that something other than a stroll on the Appalachian Trail was afoot, so she pursued the investigation—did a little digging, did a little raking—and hit pay dirt.

Those are the tools of any good investigative reporter—a shovel and a rake to uncover and sort through the muck politicians like Mark Sanford so plentifully supply their constituents.  If it hadn’t been for Smith’s persistence, Sanford’s dishonesty might have taken longer to be uncovered—or even have been obscured in the glare of his golden boy image.

Stay Tuned—Your Local News Isn’t Next…or Is It?

In Chapter 5 of The Elements of Journalism, “Independence from Faction,” Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel make some predictions about the future of localism.

News consumption will move away from local topics.  National electronic news organizations will arise.  Internet news will further polarize society.  Small interest groups will spring up.  And it’s already happening!

Old Horry County Courthouse.  Conway, South Carolina.  1908.  Photographed 
by Stephen Milligan (April 3, 2011). 

Just when you thought localism might be an antidote to all the ill feelings people seem to have toward the national media…

According to the authors’ research, news consumers have more confidence in their local media than in the national media, but local media may go the way of the film camera if the these startling predictions come to pass.                         

At least the predictions were somewhat startling to me.  Through my rose-colored glasses, I thought people would always want to see their children’s names and photos in the paper or clip and save a beloved relative’s obituary.

What a quaint notion!  Why wait for a photo of a child to be published?  Children are already famous—what parent doesn’t whip out a ubiquitous cell phone, snap a photo of the child doing something allegedly cute, and upload it to a social media site, if not multiple social media sites?  Every moment of one’s existence is captured and published these days.

And why wait for that obituary to be published when it can be found instantly online?  You can even sign the online guestbook—no need to attend a visitation to sign a real guestbook, or rather print in it since no one is taught cursive writing anymore.

In the dark ages of my childhood, my hometown, little old Conway, South Carolina, had two newspapers, The Field and Herald (named for the town’s agricultural heritage) and The Horry Independent (pronounced OR-ee and named for the county, Horry, which developed a reputation for independence since it’s cut off from the rest of South Carolina by rivers; the county was named for local Revolutionary War hero Peter Horry).

Now, keep in mind both of these newspapers were weekly papers, so we had to wait an entire week to see the school honor roll or the latest tobacco crop yield report.

The Field and Herald has been long gone, but The Horry Independent is still thriving; in fact, it’s part of a larger publishing group, Waccamaw Publishers (named for the river that runs through the heart of the county; ultimately named for the local Native American tribe), that prints weekly newspapers for several of the smaller, rural towns and communities in the county (The Sun News is the county’s daily paper out of Myrtle Beach).

Maybe this publishing group is an anomaly, an anachronism, in today’s media world.

Or maybe localism is still alive…in your local newspaper, your local magazine, your local radio news show, your local television news program.

In another word—dare I say it?  Locally.

From Mining Disaster to Media Disaster

In Chapter 6 of Blur, “Evidence and the Journalism of Verification,” Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel tell the story of the January 2, 2006, Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia to illustrate the journalist’s need to verify information by knowing it as opposed to merely relying on observation.

The tragedy of the mine’s explosion was compounded by the tragedy of the media’s misreporting of the number of survivors.  Thirteen miners were trapped in the mine.  Initial media reports went out saying twelve miners had survived (meaning one hadn’t), but the reality was horribly, ironically the opposite: twelve miners had perished and only one had survived.

Ariail, Robert.  Robert Ariail.  "The Miners Are Alive!"  Editorial Cartoon.  The State.  6 Jan. 
2006.

I remember this story well and have used it in Journalism I before in a discussion of ethics.

Like many newspapers across the country, Columbia’s newspaper, The State, published the story on January 4, 2006.

Once the truth of the number of survivors came out, the media’s thought and decision-making processes were evaluated in detail.

On January 5, 2006, The State ran two explanatory pieces about what went wrong from the media’s perspective.  Unfortunately, a quick search of the internet didn’t produce any links to these pieces.

The first was headlined “Late-hour revelation hamstrings media” with the deck “A Chronology of Confusion.” This was a sort of standalone that included a timeline attributed to Cox News Service and graphics of other newspapers’ front pages showing how they had published the same error.

The other explanatory piece, a story headlined “Erroneous reports lead to media soul-searching,” was datelined New York and attributed to wire reports.  The story details how the news of the real death toll wasn’t widely known until after most newspapers, particularly on the East Coast, had already printed and begun distribution, whereas newspapers on the West Coast were a bit more reliable because of the time difference: The Sacramento Bee published the story headlined “Joy to Despair,” and the Los Angeles Times was able to recall trucks of papers with incorrect stories.

      

In a rather quaint fashion (compared to today’s lightning-fast social media reporting), the story pointed out that most internet and television news outlets were able to correct the mistake before many news consumers woke up that morning.

The State localized the story in a sidebar by explaining its own publication timing and showing graphics of two different versions of the paper’s front page.  The first edition, printed to be sent to the far reaches of the state (Charleston, Greenville, Myrtle Beach, Spartanburg) ran a story headlined “One body recovered; ‘we need a miracle.’”  The Capital Final edition, which is the version most Columbia-area residents would have received, was redesigned and sent the presses in about thirty minutes with the headline “12 miners rescued; 1 dead.”

I see now that combined with The State’s former staff cartoonist, Robert Ariail, and his perspective (the cartoon above is so old, it’s not even in his online archives), along with the discussion of the events in Blur, these explanatory pieces can be used to teach other concepts aside from ethics: building relationships with the audience, gathering and use of evidence, independent confirmation, skepticism, sourcing, transparency, verification.

If only this gold mine of a lesson hadn’t come from a coal mine of disaster. 

Relevant Revelations

This past week, I had lunch with my friend John, thanks to some dead presidents.  No, not dead presidents as in money but dead presidents as in time—Presidents’ Day.

As I was bundling up to leave the restaurant and face the frigid winter temperatures that have descended upon us, I spied a reporter from WIS, Columbia’s NBC affiliate, at a nearby table.  Out in the parking lot, I asked John if he had seen her, and he informed me he didn’t even know who I was talking about because he hardly ever watches the local television news; in fact, he couldn’t even pinpoint his last memory of tuning in to the local news.

Skyline.  Columbia, South Carolina.  Photographed by Stephen Milligan (May 30, 
2010). 

This revelation may not amaze anyone, considering how America’s news-consumption habits are rapidly changing, but this is a response I would expect from, as Tina Fey so eloquently put it on the “Weekend Update” segment of Saturday Night Live’s fortieth anniversary special just the night before, “whatever you call the little dummies who are live-tweeting this right now instead of watching it.”

Now, John is no dummy, and at just a couple of years older than me, he is in his mid-thirties…well, okay—mid-forties (I suppose I must try to maintain a few shreds of credibility here as a journalism teacher), so he doesn’t fit Fey’s description.  To top it all off, John is a lawyer who works closely with county governments in South Carolina. 

So shouldn’t a lawyer associated with county governments keep abreast of local news?

I quizzed John about where he gets his news, and, of course, he responded that he gets it online because it’s available instantly.  He went on to say how he sees local news increasingly cluttered with meaningless fluff pieces presented by anchors who aren’t really engaging to him.  John’s scorn over the word anchor was even evident.

I later scanned my copy of The Elements of Journalism to see if John had received a ghostwriting credit!  It was as if Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel were right there with us.

In Chapter 8, “Engagement and Relevance,” the authors discuss the effects infotainment has had on the news industry and its wisdom (or lack thereof) as a business strategy.  They cite the research that says viewers are becoming apathetic in their choice of local news stations, if they even watch at all—and what a dramatic decline that figure has experienced.

So where does John get his news?  His top choice is—another shocking disclosure—Google News (and I almost passed out when he used the word aggregator—many commoners outside of journalism probably would have thought he’d mispronounced the word alligator), followed by local news alerts sent to his phone from news outlets in Columbia and Greenville, about two hours away.

As Bill and Tom and John departed the chilly parking lot, I thought back on the most fascinating revelation of the day—during a discussion over lunch of the snow predicted for Columbia this past week (which never materialized) and memories of past snowfalls, John revealed he had been a school bus driver when he was in high school.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around that news alert. 

You Can’t Please Everyone…

Since this week’s topic for the Social Role of the Mass Media class is a continuation of last week’s topic, handling sensitive issues, I thought I would make this blog post sort of a continuation of my topic last week, the shooting on the University of South Carolina campus.

I realized I hadn’t looked at any of the coverage done by the university’s student newspaper.  When I was a student there, The Gamecock came out on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and may have been at most eight pages each predominately black-and-white issue.  Now The Daily Gamecock publishes daily and, of course, has an online presence, which put last week’s coverage at my fingertips.

Capstone House.  University of South Carolina.  Columbia, South Carolina.  1967.  
Modern style.  Photographed by Stephen Milligan (May 30, 2010). 

A special memorial edition of the newspaper was published last Friday, the day after the murder-suicide.  Also that morning, the Editor-in-Chief, Hannah Jeffrey, posted an editorial headlined “Letter from the Editor: Why you won't find individuals' names in Friday's paper.”

In the piece, Jeffrey explains the thought process behind the newspaper’s decision to not publish the names of the victim and the assailant that Friday morning since official word had not yet come from the Richland County Coroner (long after the paper’s press run). 

Exactly what we’ve been immersed in the past couple of weeks: Sensitivity.  Verification.  Transparency.  Maintaining credibility.  Time being the enemy of accuracy.  Informing the reader of editorial choices.

How professional of Jeffrey to explain the decision to the reader when so many rumors surely would have been traveling all over campus and Columbia.  Some of the posted comments agreed with her, applauding the decision for its good journalism and ethical standards.

Interestingly, though, a few of the comments harkened to this week’s other newsworthy topic: Brian Williams.  Some of the readers accused The Daily Gamecock staff of tooting its own horn and making the news about the staff instead of the murdered professor.

“You see, you can’t please everyone,” as Rick Nelson sang in “Garden Party.”

But Jeffrey did what she thought was right for her readers.

“So you’ve got to please yourself.”

Close to Home

Well, I wish this one hadn’t fallen into my lap.

Today at approximately 12:56 P.M., a shooting, an apparent murder-suicide, occurred at the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina, my alma mater and less than five miles from my house.

Detail.  McKissick Museum.  University of South Carolina.  
Columbia, South Carolina.  1939.  Works Progress Administration 
Romanesque style.  Photographed by Stephen Milligan (August 
15, 2009). 

Coincidentally, at about the same time, a car accident occurred just outside the building at the corner of Assembly and College streets (USC is an open, downtown campus), so among all of the confusion, the misinformation began to fly on social media.  According to WIS, Columbia’s NBC affiliate, rumors of the shooting’s nature and location were spread on social media: It was an active shooter situation.  It took place on the Horseshoe, the original part of campus.  At Russell House, the university union.  Even at the South Carolina State House, just blocks away.

WIS devoted all of its 5:00 and 5:30 news broadcasts to the event (with only a two-minute look at the weather) and much of its 6:00 broadcast.  The reporter on the scene, after discussing the inaccurate social media reports with the evening anchor, who had joined her there, then exhorted the audience to verify any information before sharing it on social media.

Details are still emerging as I listen to WIS’s 7:00 news report, most of which is devoted to the shooting, but I’ve already noticed a little time is being devoted to sports, weather, and traffic, but no other news has been reported.

Not only is this story close to home geographically, but it’s also close to home as far as the Social Role of Mass Media class goes.  Verification.  Erroneous Twitter reports.  Accuracy.  Completeness.  Sensitive issues.  All of these were topics of this week’s class readings.  And all of these issues are embodied in this story:

Verification?  The reporter chose the responsible route by asking the public to verify information before sharing on social media to minimize the spread of mistaken reports. 

Erroneous Twitter reports?  The rumors in those initial reports have been dispelled…but will probably be replaced by others. 

Completeness?  Obviously the story is incomplete at the moment, so much of the 7:00 news involved reiterating and discussing—no information about the two who died can be released until the Richland County coroner gives approval. 

Accuracy?  WIS is, for many, the best source of television news in the Midlands, so I’m sure accuracy is something each reporting team is striving for.

Sensitive issue?  Definitely.