Crossroads of civilisation

A lovely find from Richard Sambrook

Journalist who broke the story of the Dalai Lama's flight passes away

His name probably won't go down as one of the famous journalists of our time but

Veteran journalist Naresh Chandra Rajkhowa, who broke the news about the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet through Tawang in March 1959 and his seeking asylum in India, passed away at his Chandmari residence here on Monday. He was 87.

via The Hindu

Mr. Rajkhowa was also the first Indian journalist to have interviewed the Tibetan religious leader. The Dalai Lama’s request letter for asylum had reached Mr. Rajkhowa by mistake in Shillong, where he was based as the correspondent of the The Assam Tribune, a local English daily published from Guwahati.
The messenger, who carried the Dalai Lama’s request letter written in English, reached Mr. Rajkhowa instead of a government official to whom the letter was addressed and who was residing near the journalist’s residence.

Ht-Sans Serif

Tweeting in 1889

Well they certainly look like tweets.This was the Boston Daily Journal. December 5, 1889.

the longer I stare at these old newspapers, the more I am bewitched by the cumulative insanity and variety and intellectual free-fall of these deep stacks of randomly interesting nonsense.

Ht-The Hope chest

1918 lessons and what not to learn about it

There is a great post in Slate magazine by Jack Shafer(ht-Adrian Monck)in which the writer looks back to 1918 when there was another crisis in the newspaper industry.

In his much remarked-on obituary for the dead dailies in the January 1918 Atlantic Monthly, Oswald Garrison Villard described the passing of these papers in language that could have been lifted from the recent eulogies for the shuttered Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News. Villard, editor and publisher of The Nation, called the Boston Journal's demise a "tragedy of journalism"—one that could potentially slay democracy, too, because multiple news sources were required to present "both sides of every issue" to the citizenry.

Then it was as today a profitabilty issue with owners unwilling to sustain losses but these were caused

not by vanity purchases by outsiders but poorly timed investments by newspaper insiders

It used to be says Shafer

that no price was too high if it laid claim to the dominant daily in a market.

Libraries gave us power

It's 1996, and you're bored. What do you do? If you're one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you'd do in 2009: Go online. Crank up your modem, wait 20 seconds as you log in, and there you are—"Welcome." You check your mail, then spend a few minutes chatting with your AOL buddies about which of you has the funniest screen name

So writes Farhad Manjoo over at Slate magazine.

And how times have changed.It is difficult to think back to a period when there was

no YouTube, Digg, Huffington Post, or Gawker. There's no Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia. A few newspapers and magazines have begun to put their articles online

The big question is are we better off today than in 1996?

In some ways yes.As the Manic Street preachers sang "Libraries gave us power" and the web's library certainly has.

Have we used it to its best potential.Well that question remains to be answered.

Personally I think that societies digital evolution is a long way from the end and it will be another generation before the full consequences of the digital age will be seen.

A glimpse of the future back in 1981

Reading the morning's paper on your computer-no it will never happen




Good spot by Adrian Monck

On journalism's professionalism v quality v career

There has been some debate around the blogsphere this weekend about professional journalism.

It seemed to start with Howard Owens who was rather critical of the profession in his post "How to re invent journalism"

It is certainly worth a read and there are some good points,but comments such as

Stop writing for the front page. Too many journalists — and I was this way as a reporter, too — think that getting a story on the front page is the only viable confirmation of their worth as a journalist.

and

Stop treating journalism like a competition. It’s fun to beat the other news outlets, but that shouldn’t be the only reason to pursue a story. Treating every story like a scoop leads to errors, both in reporting and thought process about how to handle the story.

Seem to suggest that journalists has according to Howard sacrificed its quality elements in an attempt to chase readership and get themselves noticed.

On the same day Howard posts that "Maybe it is journalism itself which is the problem in which he suggests that

"individual journalists start paying attention to what readers want. That was the point behind my reader satisfaction post. The goal is to find some meaningful measure of reader satisfaction and fashion a new journalism that meets reader needs

Adrian Monck has not taken to these comments saying that

the decline of newspapers has almost nothing to do with the lengthy moral failures of print journalism

and refering to

journalism’s culture of self-flagellation

I like Kristine Lowe's analogy of a news story

we should also look hard at just how professional supposed professional journalism is. Today I heard a CEO of a large insurance firm talk about the day his company eliminated 200 jobs — 200 out of 40,000. He talked about how he prepared his employees for the media onslaught he knew was coming, with anchors bellowing and headlines screaming about the downturn of the company’s fortunes. These weren’t even layoffs, but merely the elimination of unfilled positions

For the public this is often how the profession is seen,rightly or wrongly.Whether that is the fault of journalism or simply a failed perception is debatable.

It is interesting going back to Howard Owen's earlier point that journalism teaching tells you to go out and get by lines,so that you have got something on the Cv to present to perspective employers.It is no different to any other career really in that you have to get yourself noticed.The question is when does that drive mean that quality is sacrificed in the search for glory

It was 40 years ago

Richard Nixon, speaking about the media coverage of the Vietnam War, said that

It was complicated by factors that had never before occurred in America’s conduct of war. The American news media had come to dominate domestic opinion about it purpose and conduct…..Eventually this contributed to the impression that we were fighting in military and moral quicksand, rather than toward an important and worthwhile objective

(Richard Nixon, the memoirs, Grosset and Dunlop,1978,New York,p350)

It is forty years since events around the world from Vietnam,Paris,Prague and Chicage were portrayed in the media.It was a landmark in media coverage.Protesters on the streets of America would shout that the whole world is watching at the riot police.For the first time,the nightly news would show in graphic detail what some thoight were revoltionary events which would change the shape of the world.It wasn,t quite to be.The war in Asia contiued for 6 more years,Soviet tanks put down a popular uprisinga and a Prague spring would have to wait another 20 years.the youth culture in the West would experience the realities of 1970's economics.

Sean O'Hagan writes of one of its heroes Daniel Cohn Bendit

The catalyst for his fame was television. In 1968 two technological innovations transformed the nightly news reports: the use of videotape, which was cheap and reusable, instead of film, and the same-day broadcast, which meant that often unedited images of rebellion were disseminated across continents almost as they happened. Student protesters in Berkeley and Columbia cheered their TV sets as footage from the Paris barricades made the American news in May, while French students took heart from images of the huge anti-war demonstrations now occurring across Europe and America.

Perhaps history teaches us that journalism is at the crossroads

With all the changes that are currently taking place in the media world,sometimes the past can teach us lessons

According to Howard Owens and something that I agree with

We don’t spend a lot of time talking about our profession’s history, even though history might teach us a good deal about today

The book's:

primary theme is that journalism has evolved in response to changes in society

.

It covers American history of the press and cites

The rise of McCarthysm, the Bay of Pigs and the start of the war in Vietnam were all events that helped create within society a greater sense that the U.S. government, now no longer easily accessible, was not always worthy of trust. For the first time, the press began to take on a watch dog role and investigative reporting was born.

I wonder whether this is indeed the case now though,Howard concludes by asking

society is apparently going through its largest upheaval, especially in terms of how it interacts with media, since at least the 1960s, if not the earliest parts of the 2oth Century.
If that’s the case, should today’s journalist react with “we should keep doing what we’ve always been doing” attitude, or figure out how journalism needs to change to meet new demands and new needs?