Christopher H. Sterling, ed., Encyclopedia of Journalism: Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Reference, 2009. 6 vols., 3,136 pp. $795. ISBN-10: 0761929576; ISBN-13: 978-0761929574

Soc (2011) 48:8487DOI 10.1007/s12115-010-9386-3

BOOK REVIEW

Christopher H. Sterling, ed., Encyclopedia of Journalism

Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Reference, 2009. 6 vols., 3,136 pp. $795. ISBN-10: 0761929576; ISBN-13: 978-0761929574

Stephen Bates

Published online: 30 November 2010# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

In 1844, Samuel F. B. Morse showed off his magnetic telegraph by sending the message What hath God wrought? from Washington to his partner, Alfred Vail, in Baltimore. In a follow-up demonstration two days later, Morse asked, Have you any news? Vail replied, No.

But news soon zipped over the fast-spreading telegraph network. A year after the Baltimore-Washington tryouts, one newspaper went so far as to predict that the invention would kill off much of journalism. The New York Herald said that the papers will experience to a degree, that must in a vast number of cases be fatal, the effects of the new mode of circulating intelligence.... The mere newspapers the circulators of intelligence merelymust submit to destiny and go out of existence. People would get the latest news directly by telegraph, it seems. The telegraph did end up revolutionizing newsgathering, especially with the rise of the Associated Press, yet news delivery remained much the same. Rather than congregating around telegraph tickers to hear the latest, people continued to rely on those mere newspapers.

Today, though, the threat is more palpable than in 1845. Newspaper statistics from the indispensable Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism range from discouraging to chilling. (The situation is bleak for other news media too, though it seems that cable news is beginning to rebound.) The typical newspaper stock is down 80 to 90 percent from its peak. In the last three years, newsroom employment has fallen by a quarter. Newspaper circulation has dropped by

over a quarter since 2000though as James Fallows points out in The Atlantic, the trend predates the Internet. Newspapers sold 1.4 copies per household in 1947. Now its below 0.5.

What the Internet has brought about is a hemorrhage in ad sales. In the last three years, newspapers ad revenue has fallen by over 40 percent, mostly due to competition from online firms outside the news business. In particular, the largely free Craigslist has undermined the sale of classified ads, which once accounted for close to a third of newspaper revenues. (Craig Newmark deserves a big share of blame for the demise of newspapers, though as in Murder on the Orient Express, this crime has many culprits.) As for newspapers display ads, they simply dont make the same money online as off-. Researchers in 2007 calculated that a subscriber generates over $500 per year for a newspaper, whereas the typical visitor to a newspaper website generates just $5 to $10 per year (957). Of people who get news online, Pew finds that 79 percent rarely or never click on ads. Despite the frenzy of online activity, Pew also reports that newspapers still get 90 percent of their revenue from print advertising and subscriptions. In fact, American papers online ad revenue actually fell between 2008 and 2009.

In the quest for another source of money, The New York Times is preparing to put much of its content behind a pay wall. If you read more than a certain number of articles online, youll have to buy a pass or a print subscription. But consumers may just wander to the many news sites that offer free content. Pew finds that of Americans who claim to have a favorite news site, just 19 percent would remain loyal if a pay wall arose.

ProPublica and some other recently formed nonprofit news outlets are seeking financial support from foundations, a la National Public Radio. A ProPublica article

S. Bates (*)

Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies, University of Nevada, Las Vegas,4505 S. Maryland Pkwy, Box 455007, Las Vegas, NV 89154, USAe-mail: [email protected]

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published in The New York Times Magazine last year Sheri Finks expos of a New Orleans hospital in which dozens of patients died during Hurricane Katrinawon a Pulitzer Prize. And a few people want some form of government bailout. A Federal Trade Commission discussion paper talks about, among other proposals, taxing each Internet user, with proceeds to be doled out to online news sites by the Copyright Office; creating a journalism division in AmeriCorps, the federally funded volunteer program; granting tax credits to news outlets for the journalists they employ; and paying universities to undertake investigative reporting.

But nobody knows whether any of this will work. As Wolcott Gibbs wrote in a famous New Yorker parody of Times style in 1936, Where it will all end, knows God!

Little wonder that the Encyclopedia of Journalism sometimes sounds glum. Defeatism even infects a few titlesmass media, decline of, news audiences, decline of. In the latter entry, Christine L. Ogan sums up the present situation nicely: If print and broadcast news are to survive and if the Internet is going to continue to include high-quality news and public affairs, ... the money to pay reporters to gather that information must come from somewhere (959).

Ogans essays is among some 360 here, international in scope, starting with ABC News and ending with womens magazines. The pieces, written by more than 200 scholars, have been capably assembled by Christopher H. Sterling of George Washington University. The essays fill the first four volumes of the encyclopedia. (Conveniently if profligately, the 172-page index is reprinted at the end of each volume of essays.) Volume 5 comprises primary documents, including major court cases and newsroom ethics codes; Volume 6, appendices, including an extensive bibliography.

Editingwhether its a newspaper or an encyclopedia means choosing, and Sterling has made some praiseworthy choices. Journalism scholarship, like journalism itself, often tells the stories of individuals. Here, though, you wont find entries devoted to Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, or Bob Woodward. Instead, the focus is, rightly, on institutions and broad topics. Thats not to say that the superstars get slighted; under such entries as CBS News and war correspondents, theres ample Murrow (born Egbert Murrow, were told). To his credit, too, Sterling defines journalism broadly. He includes celebrity magazines, travel writing, documentaries, and book-length works of report-age. And he features savvy essays about topics that may not leap to mind when you first contemplate an encyclopedia of journalism, including violence against journalists, undersea cables, hoaxes, plagiarism, and distribution.

In the last, one of the encyclopedias best entries, William J. Thorn reminds us that delivery of the news has changed before, even as it remained on paper (425-431). Under

postmaster Benjamin Franklin, postal carriers had to buy newspaper subscriptions and resell them to consumers. Starting in 1833, Benjamin Day sold a hundred copies of his New York Sun for 66 cents to young distributors, the first newsboys, who then sold the paper for a penny apiece generating an income that sometimes exceeded their fathers. By the 1980s, the industry faced a delivery crisis, writes Thorn: As family size declined with birth control, legal abortion, and dual income households, many families refused to complicate family life with a daily newspaper route. Most newspapers came to rely on adult carriers. As the next step, Thorn, like many others, anticipates portable video screens, thin and flexible, that will shift the news away from ink-on-newsprint altogether.

Throughout the four volumes of essays, Sterlings contributors come up with shrewd insights. Robert Wyss traces environmental journalism back to the New York Evening Posts 1844 crusade for a public park in New York City, which became Central Park (530). Christopher Bell predicts, As the chasm between hard and soft news shrinks, and the narrative blends in with the inverted pyramid approach to form a combined or melded category, the terms hard and soft news may slowly disappear altogether (689)a welcome development. Judy Polumbaum notes that USA Todays color weather map may be the most widely imitated newspaper innovation ever (1417). Raymond Fielding points out that newsreels may be the only major medium of communication that ever ... went completely out of business (994). At least the only one so far.

A few other decisions by the editor dont hold up as well, though. The encyclopedias entry on news coverage of presidential families says nothing about family privacy (11021106), and the privacy entry talks solely of law and says nothing about ethics (11281132). Watergate perhaps the defining event for modern-day investigative reportingis subsumed under presidential scandals and dealt with in three cursory paragraphs. Parody of news and satire of news are addressed in separate entries, a defensible distinction, but, confusingly, both cite The Daily Show as a prime example of the genre under discussion (1045; 1247). The excellent essay on typography, by Jim Martin, cries out for illustrations but doesnt get any.

There are a handful of glitches, too. CBS is referred to as the Central Broadcasting System (its Columbia) (746). More and more Americans rely for their news, were told, on The Daily Show (yes) and The Onion (one hopes not) (525). Walter Cronkite is correctly listed as having died in 2009 (330); unfortunately, so is Katie Couric (85). And that oft-recurring index is only so-so. For example, neither anonymous nor sources will lead you to a discussion of, as Jack Shafer of Slate calls them, anonymice; you must instead consult the index entry for criticism of journal-

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ism. Slate doesnt get its own entry either; youll find it under Internet impact on media: websites.

Inevitably, timeliness is another issue. Unlike a newspaper, an encyclopedia is a onetime publication that has been years in preparation and a year or longer in production. Some entries naturally get outdated by the time the work appears. In the last two volumes here, Sterling publishes excerpts of several annual studies, including Pews, from 2008. Theyre outdated, and the latest version is easy to find online. Were they worth the pages? Similarly, pass MySpace gets more attention than au courant (but perhaps soon-to-be-pass) Facebook (1297-1298). And Sterling devotes two pages to Air America, the radio network that has been defunct since January 21 of this year (63-65). Air America seems likely to be forgotten except as the launching pad for Al Franken. Franken didnt become the liberal Rush Limbaugh, as he set out to do, but he did manage to become a Democratic U.S. Senator from Minnesota.

Limbaugh himself appears several times here, and he plainly vexes a contributor. In one-paragraph bios of prominent talk-radio hosts, Richard Landesberg finds space to note Limbaughs addiction to painkillers (1373)the sort of gossip that seems to appear nowhere else in the encyclopedia. From the same perspective, Robin Gallagher calls Chief Justice Warren Burger the purported nemesis of all civil liberties (745). Purported by whom? And Claude-Jean Bertrand cites, as the dangers of extremes in regulating the press, what state tyranny did to Soviet media, and what near total deregulation has done to American media since the 1980s (879). A fair comparison?

But perhaps such passages are apt, given the research (though disputed) that finds news reporters and editors to be disproportionately left of center. Does it matter? When average news consumers try to evaluate the fairness of news coverage, Gerard Matthews writes here, their conclusions are likely to result from their own personal biases (159). But journalists hold themselves up as different; professional values are said to trump personal politics. In fact, Matthews, like many others, contends that some journalists work so hard to prevent their personal biases from creeping into their work that they overcompensate and end up supporting the opposite viewpoint. By that bend-over-backwards reasoning, we ought to welcome racists and homophobes into the newsroom. Advocates of newsroom diversity, by contrast, rightly suggest that journalists values and life experiences influence their coverage.

The encyclopedia estimates that around 10 million blogs maintained by non-journalists address news and public affairs (166), and, like Limbaugh, those online arrivistes come in for some scorn. Rex A. Martin sniffs that there has been no move to establish parameters for or to rein in the worse excesses of the amateurs that conduct citizen

journalism (1279). Such criticism is no surprise, for journalists have always looked askance at newcomers. Print reporters of the past mocked newsreels (992).

The sins of these latest reporters without press cards will sort themselves out. The larger problem with so-called citizen journalism is that its not breaking many stories. Pew studied a weeks worth of news in Baltimore last year and found that 95 percent of information published in any medium, blogs included, came from traditional media, mostly newspapers. The amateurs bring attention to news, but they dont do much in the way of original reporting. Unfortunately, as Pew has documented, the professionals are cutting back on reporting too. The Baltimore Sun produced nearly a third fewer articles in 2009 than ten years earlier.

Another aspect of the Internet worries a couple of scholars in the encyclopedia. They fear that people online immerse themselves in material reflecting their ideological preconceptions and avoid exposing themselves to the other sidewhat Nicholas Negroponte termed the Daily Me (877; 952). But an April paper by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro of the University of Chicago casts doubt on that widely held notion. Regular visitors to Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks websites, the researchers find, tend to visit the website of The New York Times too. (The Times print edition attracts a more liberal audience than do the Wall Street Journal and USA Today.) And visitors to liberal sites tend to visit the Fox News site as well; indeed, a fifth of Fox News visitors are liberal. The Internet does feature somewhat more ideological self-segregation than broadcast news, magazines, cable, and local newspapers, but less than national newspapers such as the Times, and substantially less than interactions through voluntary associations, workplaces, neighborhoods, and families.

Of course many people do get news from only one source, but these tend to be light users, and their sole source tends to be one of the large relatively centrist outlets, Gentzkow and Shapiro explain. Most of the people who visit sites like drudgereport.com or huffingtonpost.com, by contrast, are heavy Internet users, likely with a strong interest in politics. Although their political views are relatively extreme, they also tend to consume more of everything, including centrist sites and occasionally sites with conflicting ideology. Their omnivorousness outweighs their ideological extremity, preventing their overall news diet from becoming too skewed.

For omnivores and light grazers alike, the future is plainly onlinemost likely those flexible, portable screens that Thorn foresees. The Christian Science Monitor abandoned its print edition in 2009, and an executive of the Financial Times has said that the paper will be almost entirely online within five years. According to the Poynter Institute, newspapers devote around 15 percent of their outlays to news, 50 to 60 percent to production and

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distribution, and the rest to ad sales and management. A shift away from print will eliminate much of that production and distribution expense, leaving more money for newsgathering; currently, says Poynter, online news outlets devote from 65 to 85 percent of their budgets to the newsroom. There just arent enough well-funded online news outlets to make up for all the reporting that newspapers are no longer doing.

Back in 1845, the New York Herald didnt forecast that the telegraph would doom all newspapers. Those circulators of intelligence merely would die; people would get the basic news by telegraph. But that journalism ... which possesses intellect, mind and originality will not suffer. On the contrary: Its sphere of action will be widened.... The swift communication of tidings of great events will awake

in the masses of the community still keener interest in public affairs. Thus the intellectual, philosophic and original journalist will have a greater, a more excited, and more thoughtful audience than ever.

The telegraph didnt bring that utopia. (The Herald also said of the invention, No better bond of union for a great confederacy of States could have been devised. Sixteen years later came Fort Sumter.) But we can hope that the Internet does find an audience that supports intellectual, philosophic, and original journalists, not just pontificators but also reporterswhether they carry press cards or not.

Stephen Bates Advisory Editor of Society, teaches in the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.