Leonard Witt at Universidad Santo Tomás, Bogotá, Colombia

The conference was impressive with a nice line-up of topics and speakers. If you speak Spanish, you can find out more here about the presentations. Here is a little Flickr slideshow I put together.

For Spanish speakers here is a video below:

Through Friday, of 270 news articles published in The Times about the election since the national tickets were formed in late August, only 29, or a little over 10 percent, were primarily about policy substance. And that is a generous tally that includes some very brief items.

That count by my assistant, Michael McElroy, is similar to figures compiled by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which has been closely monitoring election coverage in a wide range of media. The group found that only 8 percent of front-page articles in The Times from late August through last Sunday were about policy. Nearly three-quarters were about the horse race, political tactics, polls and the like. The Times numbers are about the same as for the news media in general, including cable television and blogs — not a standard to aspire to.

Apparently, that does not make the public happy; Hoyt writes:

Early this year, roughly three-quarters of voters of all political persuasions surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press said they wanted more coverage of the candidates’ stands on issues. For the most part, they were disappointed, and their satisfaction with the news media has declined, according to Pew. In February, 55 percent said the election coverage was good or excellent. By June, 54 percent said it was fair or poor.

Those interested in civic and public journalism have been taking on this issue since the public journalism reform movement began  after the 1988 presidential election. Jay Rosen has been one of the most informed critics. Here is what he said back in January, 2008. Here is what I wrote in October 2007 and if you want to keep going back, here is Rosen again in 2004 with his PressThink piece Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race. Forever!

If I were surveyed, I would answer that I want more issue oriented stories. However, here is a confession: I can’t help myself, apparently like a lot of political junkies, each day I visit places like FiveThirtyEight.com which provides fantastic horse race coverage, just like inside baseball. It is addictive. Here is what FiveThirtyEight posted last week about the site’s audience growth:

Seven months ago today this site … went live, with 80 visits. Yesterday we reached 693,216 … Glancing at the daily circulation figures for US newspapers, it looks like we’re at or about the top ten and rising with a bullet.

So for me I want my polls and my substantial reporting too. Right now we are obviously getting more of the former and too little of the latter and that is the big problem now, has been the problem in the past and will probably be the problem forever.

If you just keep clicking on the video advance button on the video, it will take to that 26-minute place.

1. “Newspaper” no longer accurately describes the full range of products that traditional print journalism outlets are producing.

2. “Newspaper” no longer accurately describes the full range of journalistic work that our division members study. At the Chicago convention, we will hear research presentations on newspaper online interactivity, copy editors’ roles in the “digital revolution,” online citizen journalism and reporters’
blogs.

3. Giving the division a name that accurately reflects the breadth of our interests might help us stem a decline in membership. Although the Newspaper Division remains the largest in AEJMC (by just 20 members), membership has fallen 13.3 percent since 2004, from 684 to 593. It’s impossible to say for sure what caused the decline, but it’s possible that some AEJMC members are not joining our division or renewing membership in it because they think all we are concerned with is what some view as a dying medium. (I don’t share that view, but it is out there.)

4. Giving the division a name that accurately reflects the breadth of our interests might help us stem a decline over the past few years in paper submissions. Again, it’s impossible to say for sure why our submissions have been down, but it may be that scholars studying such topics as online news sites, for example, have perceived our division as being focused only on news printed on paper.

5. Expanding our division’s name to something like “Newspaper and Online Journalism Division” or “Newspaper and Newer Media Division” — or some better name members suggest — would let us offer a division home to the scholars who study online and newer media journalism. Some of those people are now affiliated with AEJMC’s Communication Technology Division. But foroth ers, whose work is focused more on *journalism* than *technology,* that division may not seem like the perfect fit.

6. Expanding our division’s name might help us better weather any internal reorganization that grows out of adopting the AEJMC Strategic Plan, which members will be asked to vote on in Chicago. (You can read more about it, from my perspective, here.

One idea that seems popular is the name “News Media” Division. Well, I guess that works if you want to be ALL encompassing.

I will watch the discussion and post some responses to her proposal in the next couple of days. Here is one from Buck Ryan, School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky:

On a good day in 1690 you could read a newspaper, Publick Occurrences: Both Forreign and Domestick, and this morning my newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, was on my doorstep at 6 a.m.

Having attended a World Association of Newspapers convention and having purchased newspapers at newsstands in South America, Europe and Asia, I think the death of “newspaper” has been greatly exaggerated.

If the ABC News Presidential Primary debate debacle had happened back then, people like David Brooks and George Stephanopoulos with their now totally neanderthal view of quality news and information, would have had the megaphone and totally trumped any criticism and put the Public Journalism people on the defensive. The movement had the right ideas, but lacked the DNA to make them heard and happen. In a figurative sense public journalism lacked the equivalent of thumbs. But alas it has the thumbs now.

In 2004 I wrote:

The new weblog-infused DNA makes public journalism more nimble and provides it with figurative set of thumbs. It allows public journalism to grasp and do things impossible in the old public journalism… We want to ensure that the … spin doctors do not control our elections..

I do believe if there are any spin doctors out there today thinking like Brooks did in his New York Times column, they are in big trouble. Brooks wrote:

We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues. 

This week, some 20 years after the first protests about this inane, neanderthal type of journalism, the spin doctors, Stephanopoulos and Brooks have learned that the people have their own megaphones and that the once struggling public journalism has evolved into the public’s journalism and its new thumbs cannot only grasp, but when push comes to shove, they can gouge.

First, Democrats, and especially Obama supporters, are going to jump all over ABC for the choice of topics: too many gaffe questions, not enough policy questions.

I understand the complaints, but I thought the questions were excellent. The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that…

Here is my favorite part, Brooks writes:

We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues.

Hey David, you forgot to mention that while H. W. Bush was touring the flag factories during the 1988 election the Republicans were also running the racist Willie Horton ads. In fact, it was exactly the very trivia and sleaze that David Brooks thinks is good journalism that led to the public or civic journalism movement. Here is what Charlotte Grimes wrote in a Harvard public policy paper:

The defining event for civic journalism is usually pinned to the 1988 presidential campaign, with its fixation on horse-race polls and focus on Gary Hart’s adultery, George Bush’s visits to flag factories and Willie Horton ads, and Michael Dukakis’ ride in a tank. The campaign was a triumph of trivia, sleaze and manipulation. And it provoked an outburst of soul-searching by many journalists on their role in it.

Apparently it caused no soul searching for David Brooks — he thinks manipulative questions are good journalism. He can make his elitist, well-mannered argument, but on this one I am siding with  my wife, who during the “symbolic issues” questioning Brooks describes above, was screaming: Haven’t they heard how many people died in Iraq today? Ask a question about that. Haven’t they heard how many people are losing their homes today? Ask about that.

David, maybe you haven’t heard, the American people are tired of the trivia oriented, sleazy and manipulative political maneuvering, which you so politely call “symbolic issues.”

Of course, David Brooks, who has sided with the current administration on so many bad policy decisions, would prefer that the real issues get ignored. So David let me ask you a symbolic issues question: Which is more important an American flag lapel pin or the 4,000 plus flag-draped caskets that have come back to America from the Iraq war which you supported? Apparently in a debate you think the former is more important, my wife thinks the latter and so do I and so do most other Americans.

When I wrote The Virtual Community in 1992, the most important question to me was whether or not the advent of many-to-many communication via the Internet would lead to stronger or weaker democracies, more or less personal liberty, which led me to the work of Jurgen Habermas on what he called “the public sphere.”

As it turns out Rheingold has still not resolved that question and after the lecture at Stanford, he asked Habermas:

…what he thought of the future and health of the public sphere, now that the broadcast era he wrote about has been supplanted by an infosphere in which so many people use the infosphere to express political opinion. 

Rheingold says of Habermas’s response:

He blew me off! 

Rheingold was most distressed that Habermas didn’t seem to understand the digital revolution, and should have said that young scholars should be continuing his earlier work and its  relevancy to the age of the internet because Rheingold writes:

unless we know, and know soon, whether or not the web as it is developing can revitalize the public sphere, all other philosophical conversations may be mooted by the rise of disinfotainment, disinformocracy  and the actual emergence of the simulation that we don’t recognize as a simulation described by Baudrillard.

The defining event for civic journalism is usually pinned to the 1988 presidential campaign, with its fixation on horse-race polls and focus on Gary Hart’s adultery, George Bush’s visits to flag factories and Willie Horton ads, and Michael Dukakis’ ride in a tank. The campaign was a triumph of trivia, sleaze and manipulation. And it provoked an outburst of soul-searching by many journalists on their role in it.

Apparently the horse-race mentality is alive and well among the mainstream press as we move toward the 2008 presidential elections. A study produced by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard released this week, reveals:

In all, 63% of the campaign stories focused on political and tactical aspects of the campaign. That is nearly four times the number of stories about the personal backgrounds of the candidates (17%) or the candidates’ ideas and policy proposals (15%). And just 1% of stories examined the candidates’ records or past public performance, the study found.

The press’ focus on fundraising, tactics and polling is even more evident if one looks at how stories were framed rather than the topic of the story. Just 12% of stories examined were presented in a way that explained how citizens might be affected by the election, while nearly nine-out-of-ten stories (86%) focused on matters that largely impacted only the parties and the candidates. Those numbers, incidentally, match almost exactly the campaign-centric orientation of coverage found on the eve of the primaries eight years ago.

And what do the people want:

…the public says it wants from campaign reporting. A new poll by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press conducted for this report finds that about eight-in-ten of Americans say they want more coverage of the candidates’ stances on issues, and majorities want more on the record and personal background, and backing of the candidates, more about lesser-known candidates and more about debates

Here is more:

Those results, taken together with the findings of the PEJ-Shorenstein study of coverage, suggest the press and the public are not on the same page when it comes to priorities in campaign coverage. This disparity also indicates there is room for the press to calibrate its coverage differently to make it more useful and possibly more interesting to citizens.

The public is also not that happy with the press coverage. A majority of Americans (53%) in September said the coverage has been only fair or poor, while 41% rate it as good or excellent, according to another Pew Research Center survey

Jay Rosen, a founder of the public journalism movement, now, along with Arianna Huffington, is giving his OfftheBus project a try. Will be interesting to see how that measures up to the mainstream media in quality of coverage of issues versus the horse-race mentality. Here is what Rosen said about the horse race in 2004.

ColeCampbell.info is the place where you can find information about the passions and beliefs held dear by Cole C. Campbell concerning the role of journalism and journalists in our democracy.

To honor and further Cole’s ideas, we have established the Cole C. Campbell Dialogue on Democracy endowment. These conversations will be held throughout the year in various places and media across the country.

The first speech was given by Jay T. Harris, who holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Journalism and Democracy at the University of Southern California. The full text of the speech and an interview with Harris are here.