An Elegy for Journalism?
The Colorful Past and Uncertain Future of Foreign Reporting
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Oxford University Press
2009
234 pp.
9780195181234
$24.95
Louisiana State University Press
2009
655 pp.
9780807134740
$45.00
The twenty-first century has been a traumatic one for journalism. Changes in how people consume news, combined with the great recession of 2007-9 and the business equivalent of reckless driving by some proprietors (such as the real estate mogul Sam Zell's steering the Tribune Company into bankruptcy), have produced an era that in retrospect will seem, at best, severely chastening and, at worst, catastrophic.
In Losing the News, Alex Jones, who won a Pulitzer Prize while at The New York Times and is now director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, addresses how the rise of the Internet and the precipitous decline in advertising have left print journalism, especially big-city newspapers, in desperate straits. Jones' book is a cri de coeur. John Maxwell Hamilton's Journalism's Roving Eye, meanwhile, is a prodigious account of a specific form of newsgathering -- foreign correspondence -- that has long been buffeted by pressures to cut costs and waning public interest in what happens abroad, even before the more recent challenges posed by the Internet. Journalism has a raffish and colorful past, but the annals of foreign reporting are particularly suited to the storytelling that Hamilton provides. His book is an expansive narrative that also underscores serious questions about what is happening now.
Journalism is the craft of newsgathering. Over time, it has evolved to encompass a set of standards and practices that make it -- when it is done well -- a reliable provider of facts and interpretation. Anyone can report what he sees happening around him, but there is a premium on the experienced judgment of professional writers and editors. And this is what is at stake today.
For all its shortcomings and excesses, journalism is an essential -- even indispensable -- element of any functioning democracy. Traditionally, society's other great estates -- government, education, medicine, the arts -- have had a revenue model based on taxes, fees, insurance, or philanthropy. Journalism, however, has been supported overwhelmingly by advertising and circulation -- a model that assures an ongoing tug of war between the need to cultivate the public interest and the duty to antagonize society's most powerful pillars through careful scrutiny. News organizations are civic assets as much as are universities, libraries, museums, and hospitals, but unlike these institutions, the media have never been able to count on guaranteed public support.
Nonprofit media may yet turn out to be a savior. Yet significantly, Jones and Hamilton barely mention National Public Radio or local public radio and television, despite the fact that NPR, in particular, has emerged in recent years as one of the United States' most significant sources of quality news, with more correspondents stationed abroad than all of the broadcast networks put together -- a development without precedent in journalism's history. Listeners pay for most of the cost of public radio; the rest comes largely from underwriters (in effect, corporate sponsors) and, less so, from the government. But the understanding of nonprofit media is still limited in the United States because most Americans continue to expect their news to come from businesses. Even if nonprofit journalism does not get much attention from Jones and Hamilton, this is a model deserving of more focus in the future.
PAPERBOYS
Hamilton, once a foreign correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and ABC Radio, is the dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. As such, he feels admiration and affection for fellow practitioners of the correspondent's craft. Hamilton tracks the delivery of news from its origins among Colonial printers, who first incorporated correspondence from abroad, laying the foundation for all the foreign reporting that has followed. Next came the fiercely partisan press of the post-Revolutionary period, when newspapers were more manifestoes than chronicles of events. By the late nineteenth century, newspapers had developed into the recognizable antecedents of the template that dominates today: they published a mix of news and opinion, some from reporters they had sent abroad. Perhaps the most celebrated foreign correspondent of the time was Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who, in 1869, was dispatched by James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the irreverent and innovative publisher of The New York Herald, to find the explorer David Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika.
The early twentieth century was the age of media moguls such as William Randolph Hearst, Robert McCormick, and Joseph Pulitzer and of newspapers that reflected these men's swashbuckling demeanor, political perspective, and taste in reporters and stories. Hearst, as Hamilton describes in entertaining detail, made the New York Journal into a high-profile cheerleader, if not a catalyst, for the Spanish-American War; McCormick declared his Chicago Tribune the "world's greatest newspaper"; and Pulitzer favored attention-getting stunts, such as the New York World's expedition "to save 24 white slaves from bondage in the Yucatan."
The modern era has been framed by illustrious families -- the Sulzbergers, the Grahams, the Chandlers, and the Luces -- who gave foreign reporting its most sustained period by stationing highly regarded correspondents in permanent bureaus abroad. These reporters were given the time and the means to do more than sweep in for a "scoop," to borrow the title of the iconic 1938 Evelyn Waugh novel that captured the personas of newspaper owners and their intrepid reporters.
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