Tom Rosenstiel on Journalism in America

Tom Rosenstiel

Director

Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism

As one of the nation’s top journalism experts, Tom Rosenstiel is on the front lines of two major issues facing journalism:  One involves the future of the newsroom itself, while the other pertains to the role that journalists are playing in reporting the presidential race. Changing technology and a downturn in the economy has led to massive layoffs and threatens the future of entire news organizations, even as the public’s need for reliable information is greater than ever.

Mr. Rosenstiel has been director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)—a nonpartisan research organization studying the performance of the press—for more than a decade, and previously spent nearly 20 years as a media critic and political journalist for the Los Angeles Times and other news organizations. We spoke with Mr. Rosenstiel about the current issues affecting American journalism:

Questions and Answers

Question

Based on your research of media around the country, is the current economic crisis in the newsroom related to faulty journalism or is it caused by inadequate revenue streams?

Answer

A lot of people thought the traditional media were going to lose audiences because of the information revolution—that is not what’s happened. The traditional media has held onto its audience, but it’s migrated from old platforms to new. And the new platforms don’t deliver revenue very effectively. The Internet has turned out to be an ineffective technology for delivering advertising.

There are two fundamental problems: The first is that there is no equivalent of a full-page ad on the Internet. Take, for example, the J and R Computer advertisement that’s in the New York Times print edition every day. There isn’t an ad like that on any Web site. Instead, what most people do is go directly to the J and R Computer Web site. They end up bypassing journalism altogether, and rather than retail advertising, the Internet operates more like the Yellow Pages.

The second problem is that classified advertisements have been substantially taken over by third-party aggregators such as Realtor.com, Monster.com and Craigslist.

So, the question is: If you have 30 million different people coming to your Web site every month, is there a way to convert those people into some form of revenue by providing other services beyond retail advertising? There are various possibilities. You could sell them products, rather than advertising, and you could take a commission from the sales. You could charge the Internet service provider for access to your content, and that provider could pass that fee along to the user, which is what happens with cable television.

Or you could re-examine the local Web search. Google makes a lot of money by dominating two-thirds of the search market for national and international markets, but local search is an undeveloped business. Google’s great for finding out what Ted Danson’s first movie was, but it’s not really great for searching for the best place to buy sneakers in your community.

Question

In August, you released a report entitled “The How Vs. Where of News Consumption,” which found that Americans still seek out news in the same numbers as before but they are no longer passive consumers as they are aggressive knowledge seekers. In the Internet age, your findings show that most citizens don’t want to write their own journalism, but they do want to act as editors. Why is it that most people are using media in this new way?

Answer

That’s right. What we’re learning from the data is that people really aren’t becoming their own reporters. They’re becoming their own editors. They are not doing their own citizen reporting. But they are creating their own daily menu of various traditional media, rather than leaning back and saying, “Here’s my newspaper, that’s my source.”

The agenda-setting power of the media still exists. People now go to Yahoo! and the New York Times online to find out what’s new. It’s what I call “The Awareness Instinct.” The desire to be aware of what is going on around us has not disappeared with the invention of the Internet.
The stories that we write do have to change—to become more skeptical and more transparent—and in addition to the stories, there need to be databases available that are searchable and scannable. Media should be giving people data they can put to use, not just the narrative.

Also, one traditional role of journalism had been to be the gatekeeper of what people should and shouldn’t know. Now, the role is to authenticate what readers have already heard.

Question

What are some of the innovative new ways that newsrooms are delivering information to their readers in the Internet age?

Answer

I think that the innovations we are seeing are making news Web sites more of a knowledge destination where I can go to acquire various kinds of information. I can see—not just a particular story about Iraq or health care—but more sources of information all brought together on a landing page.

What we’re seeing the Web do is move journalism from a product to a service. “How can we answer your questions,” instead of “Here’s my story, do you want to read it?” The Web is interactive. It’s dynamic. It’s more of a dialogue.

Here are a few examples:

A journalist at a local paper said, “Rather than create a story about the murders in our town, let’s create a section of the newspaper that would note all the people who were murdered in the last year, and have a page about each one that tells their story.” Suddenly, the number of homicides in the town—which is a statistic—actually becomes a community of people who’ve passed away and who are visible. Their stories, their faces are all there in one place.

Another example is Newsday on Long Island. They did a long investigation about the gap between the station platforms and the trains. These gaps could be quite broad, even a foot wide. One person died between the gap, and the Long Island Rail Road spent years doing nothing about it. Not only did the paper put the package of stories in the paper, but they supplemented the information online. They created a map of the Long Island Rail Road, and you could click on the stations and see what the gap measurements were at any point along the rail. Additionally, they created a section online for people to contribute their own stories. This section became the most trafficked part of the package—people bearing witness to their own moments. It became a living story online. The package is now a growing and evolving story, and the Long Island Rail Road, low and behold, is now fixing the gap.

Question

You analyze presidential campaign coverage each week. Could you discuss the growing role of reporters as “fact-checkers” of the candidates’ claims?

Answer

When fact-checking, the media are not like baseball umpires whose rulings are definitive. An umpire says, “He’s out,” and the player is out—that’s not the way journalism works.

Journalists are constantly chasing down the facts. Reporters and broadcasters are saying, “That’s not true,” or “That’s an exaggeration.” Fact-checking absolutely has an effect on the media, and in performing this role, they are going to get shouted down, denounced, bullied and accused of bias more than they ever had been.

So it is not irrelevant that the press is doing fact-checking. The media are doing it more aggressively this year than in all the years I’ve been monitoring this since 1984. But it is not definitive.

[Editor’s note: On the project’s Web site, you can view the weekly Campaign Coverage Index. Also available are two in-depth reports recently released—Winning the Media Campaign and The Color of News.

Question

How is the economic crisis for news organizations changing the way they cover major news including the presidential election? Have the changes harmed the political dialogue in any way?

Answer

What most news organizations are doing, in print at least, is jettisoning the work they think their audiences could find elsewhere. The term that I hear most often from editors is that they are trying to get rid of “commodity news,” or news that can be found from multiple sources.

News organizations are trying to concentrate on what they call “franchise news,” or news that the readers might only find in their paper or from their organization. A lot of reporters cover the race for president. That’s your classic commodity news. So, a newspaper might not cover the campaign except for how it plays out in their specific state. Instead, they will use the wire services—Associated Press and Reuters—for their national news.

On one level, that’s probably a smart choice. On another level, it means that day-by-day, voters are not getting much information about what, for example, the candidate’s tax plan means to them in their specific state. When a reporter from Toledo or Philadelphia is not with the candidate every day, you lose sustained coverage that tells voters what the candidate’s ideas mean to the citizens back home. Every state has a very different demographic, and the candidate’s tax plan will mean very different things for each person. You miss out on that long interview with the candidate where you sit down and say, “Back where I come from this is what folks are worried about. Talk to me about that. Talk to me about this particular industry we have in our community.” That is lost.

Question

Given the bleak economic outlook, what hope do you see for the future of journalism?

Answer

What gives me hope is America’s curiosity and the history of how we have interacted with the news. The value of traditional journalism—verification, fairness, trying to get things right, and delivering news that is unbiased and objective—these things still matter to people. Two-thirds of Americans still want that kind of information. That number hasn’t changed.