{"id":90888,"date":"2006-10-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-18T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/2006\/10\/18\/a-harvard-panel-tackles-the-news-blues\/"},"modified":"2024-04-14T04:16:39","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T09:16:39","slug":"a-harvard-panel-tackles-the-news-blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/journalism\/2006\/10\/18\/a-harvard-panel-tackles-the-news-blues\/","title":{"rendered":"A Harvard Panel Tackles the News Blues"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twenty years ago, when Harvard University\u2019s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy<\/a> was founded, there were no bloggers, podcasts, or Fox News Channel. Reporters didn\u2019t have email addresses, letters to the editors were hand written, and telephones were plugged into walls.<\/p>\n\n

But even back in 1986, there was a growing sense of a seismically changing news business and of a widening chasm between the journalism profession and the public.<\/p>\n\n

When journalists, academics, and dignitaries gathered at Harvard on Oct. 13-14 to celebrate the Shorenstein Center\u2019s 20th<\/sup> anniversary and to evaluate the current media landscape, those core issues had been magnified exponentially by the sweeping technological change of the past two decades.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cWhat has fundamentally changed is the fragmentation of the audience,\u201d noted panelist Bill Kovach, founding chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists<\/a>. \u201cThat\u2019s what everybody is struggling with.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

Kovach and his fellow panelists spoke before a packed house (as well PBS \u201cFrontline\u201d cameras) at an Oct. 14 Shorenstein seminar. Their topic, designed as a discussion of journalism\u2019s role in American civic discourse, had a simple title: \u201cMedia and Democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

But the issues were dauntingly complex, the solutions were far from clear, and the tenor of the conversation vacillated between gloom and hope. There was certainly broad agreement that a news industry making a bumpy transition from an eroding old business model to a new but uncertain one is coping with very difficult issues.<\/p>\n\n

Brandishing survey numbers that showed a large gap between how journalists and the public thought the media did in addressing their own mistakes, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s Annenberg Public Policy Center, said \u201cwe have a problem. As trust drops, your willingness to censor the press, particularly in times of war, goes up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg lamented the emergence of punditry over inquiry, noting that \u201copinion is cheap. What\u2019s really expensive is reporting. The ratio of opinion to what opinion feeds off of is getting higher and higher. It\u2019s unclear where the good reporting is going to come from in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

Nik Gowing, a chief presenter on BBC World, talked candidly of the challenges of working in \u201cthis environment of real time news\u2026I live with that tyranny every hour…We have a constant deadline. How do you measure truth and accuracy in that?\u201d<\/p>\n\n

If the remedies to the big problems \u2013 diminishing public trust, decreasing reporting resources, and the tension between speed and accuracy \u2013 remained elusive, the panelists did raise the specter of a brighter future.<\/p>\n\n

In doing so, they seemed to pin much of their hope on the two major elements of the emerging \u201cnew media\u201d landscape \u2013 an increasing number of news delivery platforms and the growing ranks of citizens using those platforms to become witnesses and reporters.<\/p>\n\n

Mark McKinnon, who served as George W. Bush\u2019s chief media advisor, lauded the impact of this democratization of journalism, noting that \u201con the campaign side, we have people who are now virtual videographers. Candidates are pretty much exposed around the clock.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

[this new media universe]<\/p>\n\n\n

Gowing of the BBC talked about British troops who are now filming their own combat missions and have thus \u201ctaken it upon themselves to become members of the media. It\u2019s creating this new level of accountability as happened with Abu Ghraib.\u201d Journalists have to \u201cmediate\u2026a new generation of information do-ers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

There are, of course, serious obligations for journalistic organizations to scrutinize and validate this proliferation of \u201cuser generated\u201d material. But in the end, there was a general acknowledgement that these grassroots news sources represented an opportunity to be embraced, not rejected, by the profession.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve seen the rise of the citizen journalist,\u2019 asserted Jamieson flatly. \u201cI think we need to applaud this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

Twenty years ago, if the problems were already coming clear, that change as a solution was probably harder to imagine.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The media landscape has changed dramatically since Harvard’s Shorenstein Center was established 20 years ago. And when journalists and dignitaries assembled there on Oct. 13-14 to evaluate the current role of journalism in our democracy, there was good news and bad. The bad was that new technologies have created credibility concerns and economic problems for mainstream journalists. The good news may be the emergence of the citizen journalist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":154,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sub_headline":"","sub_title":"","_crdt_document":"","_prc_public_revisions":[],"_ppp_expiration_hours":0,"_ppp_enabled":false,"ai_generated_summary":"","relatedPosts":[],"reportMaterials":[],"multiSectionReport":[],"package_parts__enabled":false,"package_parts":[],"_prc_fork_parent":0,"_prc_fork_status":"","_prc_active_fork":0,"datacite_doi":"","datacite_doi_citation":"","_prc_seo_qr_attachment_id":0,"spoken_article_player_enabled":true,"bylines":[{"key":"0f7f6493-56d9-4bdb-92a5-4b15988c58b1","termId":889}],"acknowledgements":[],"displayBylines":true,"footnotes":"","prc_watchers":[]},"categories":[398,368,332,326],"tags":[],"bylines":[889],"collection":[],"datasets":[],"level_of_effort":[],"primary_audience":[],"information_type":[],"_post_visibility":[],"formats":[458],"_fund_pool":[],"languages":[],"regions-countries":[],"research-teams":[527],"workflow-status":[],"class_list":["post-90888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalists-1","category-journalists-2","category-media-industry","category-news-media-trends","bylines-mark-jurkowitz","formats-report","research-teams-journalism"],"label":false,"post_parent":0,"word_count":651,"canonical_url":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/journalism\/2006\/10\/18\/a-harvard-panel-tackles-the-news-blues\/","art_direction":false,"_embeds":[],"watchers":[],"table_of_contents":[],"report_materials":"","report_pagination":{"current_post":null,"next_post":null,"previous_post":null,"pagination_items":[]},"parent_info":{"parent_title":"A Harvard Panel Tackles the News Blues","parent_id":90888},"materialsOrdered":[],"chaptersOrdered":[],"partsOrdered":[],"partsEnabled":false,"datacite_doi":"","prc_seo_data":{"title":"A Harvard Panel Tackles the News Blues","description":"

The media landscape has changed dramatically since Harvard’s Shorenstein Center was established 20 years ago. And when journalists and dignitaries assembled there on Oct. 13-14 to evaluate the current role of journalism in our democracy, there was good news and bad. The bad was that new technologies have created credibility concerns and economic problems for mainstream journalists. The good news may be the emergence of the citizen journalist.<\/p>","og_title":"A Harvard Panel Tackles the News Blues","og_description":"

The media landscape has changed dramatically since Harvard’s Shorenstein Center was established 20 years ago. And when journalists and dignitaries assembled there on Oct. 13-14 to evaluate the current role of journalism in our democracy, there was good news and bad. The bad was that new technologies have created credibility concerns and economic problems for mainstream journalists. The good news may be the emergence of the citizen journalist.<\/p>","schema_type":"Article","noindex":false,"canonical_url":"","primary_terms":[],"custom_schema":[],"og_image":0,"indexnow_submitted_at":null,"gsc_index_status":null},"prepublish_checks":{"prc-image-alt-text":{"status":"complete","message":"No image blocks in content.","data":null},"prc-about-this-research":{"status":"incomplete","message":"Add an \"About this research\" details block.","data":null},"prc-paragraph-count":{"status":"complete","message":"Found 16 paragraphs.","data":{"count":16}},"prc-internal-link":{"status":"incomplete","message":"Add at least one internal link.","data":{"count":0}}},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"relatedPostsOrdered":[],"bylinesOrdered":[{"key":"0f7f6493-56d9-4bdb-92a5-4b15988c58b1","termId":889}],"acknowledgementsOrdered":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/154"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90888"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":135772,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90888\/revisions\/135772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90888"},{"taxonomy":"bylines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bylines?post=90888"},{"taxonomy":"collection","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/collection?post=90888"},{"taxonomy":"datasets","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/datasets?post=90888"},{"taxonomy":"level_of_effort","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/level_of_effort?post=90888"},{"taxonomy":"primary_audience","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/primary_audience?post=90888"},{"taxonomy":"information_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/information_type?post=90888"},{"taxonomy":"_post_visibility","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/_post_visibility?post=90888"},{"taxonomy":"formats","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/formats?post=90888"},{"taxonomy":"_fund_pool","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/_fund_pool?post=90888"},{"taxonomy":"languages","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/languages?post=90888"},{"taxonomy":"regions-countries","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/regions-countries?post=90888"},{"taxonomy":"research-teams","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-teams?post=90888"},{"taxonomy":"workflow-status","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/workflow-status?post=90888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}