NEW HISTORY

By Chris Daly

The departing managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, Paul Steiger, has written a noteworthy piece about the last few decades in the newspaper business. The piece is written from his perspective as a major executive at an incredibly prosperous, somewhat specialized news operation.
I wish he had paid more attention to the much longer history of news in America (see chapters elsewhere on this page), which would suggest that this current crisis in the business model is not the first.
Still, there are some notable highlights in Steiger's piece. He draws attention to the crucial business changes taking place in the 1960s and 70s (local monopolization, selling stock to the public) that created the conditions for what now appears to have been a brief period of exceptionalism in American journalism.
Plus, he offers some hilarious inside testimony about just how flush those times were. He writes:

Around the time of the 1980 slump, L.A. Times editors were told they needed to impose modest spending restraints. I figured out I could meet my target just by eliminating first-class travel on my group's reporting trips, then allowed on flights of more than three hours or so. I was quite proud of myself until the next day, when the top editor of the entire paper, who only occasionally visited our floor, strode straight to my desk. "I like flying first class," he said with a grin. "You're setting a bad example." I found another way to reach my goal.
In the mid-1980s, when I was a deputy managing editor at the Journal, the Dow Jones CEO almost apologetically imposed limits on our then-ample spending, in the face of cyclical advertising cutbacks by financial firms. As the CEO quipped, referring to then-managing-editor Norman Pearlstine, "We gave Norm an unlimited budget, and he exceeded it."

One remarkable oversight: Steiger makes no mention of one of the biggest holes in the bucket of U.S. newspapers -- Craigslist. I guess the WSJ never derived a whole lot of revenue from readers trying to sell their used boats or extra puppies.

Review of new book on The AP

Here is a review I wrote for H-Net, an on-line scholarly site for humanities and social science scholars. It is a review of a big, new history of The Associated Press (yes, my old employer, as I disclose below). In case it's not clear fromthe review, I think everyone should read this book.

Here is the text of the review, in case you want to read it right here:

REVIEW: How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else


H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by Jhistory@h-net.msu.edu (November 2007)

By Reporters of the Associated Press.
Breaking News: How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007. 432 pp. Photographs. $35.00 (cloth),
ISBN 978-1-56898-689-0.

Reviewed for Jhistory by Chris Daly
Journalism Department, Boston University

More than 30 years ago, the media scholar James Carey declared a need for a
history of reporting, calling it the central story in the realm of
journalism history.[1] Reporting is, after all, the core activity of
journalism. It is not founding newspapers or arguing over control of the
radio spectrum or defending libel suits or inventing new devices--important
as those are. First and foremost, journalism is about finding things
out--either by witnessing them or talking to people who did or reading
documents. Then, it is about writing rivers of simple declarative sentences
and taking in-focus photos and video.

Despite the explosion of research in the field since Carey's rallying cry,
the grand project of a history of reporting remains incomplete. With the
publication of _Breaking News_, though, we are a step closer.

As far as it goes, this is a terrific book. It is packed with thrilling
tales of the kind of journalistic enterprise, bravery, and occasional dumb
luck that have marked Associated Press (AP) news-gathering since the news
cooperative was founded in 1846. It is also lavishly illustrated with gems
from AP's vast storehouse of photos. To accommodate the photos, the book is
slightly oversized, and the stock is heavy, giving it the heft of a
coffee-table book.

In a decision that is reflective of the AP ethos, _Breaking News_ is a
collective effort, with authorship by "the reporters of the Associated
Press," and so lacks a distinctive voice or a strong point of view. A
wonderful touch is the foreword by David Halberstam, which only highlights
the contrast in prose styles. In his foreword, one of the last projects
completed before his death in a car accident, Halberstam offers a fond
tribute to the AP bureau he knew best--the one in Saigon in the 1960s. That
alone makes the book worthwhile.

[Full disclosure: I worked for the AP for more than ten years between late
1976 and early 1989, in New York and Boston. I mostly enjoyed it, and I left
on good terms.]

Much of _Breaking News_ pursues a familiar genre--the "story behind the
story." A reader can dip in just about anywhere and plunge into some clever
or heroic episode of triumph over obstacles or of victory over "the
opposition." We learn about some of the great lengths AP men (and a few
women) have gone to in order to "get it first and get it right." And there
are oddities, like the AP staffer who witnessed more than three hundred
executions. Many of the stories are indeed thrilling, some are inspiring,
and a few are endearing.

There was, for example, the amazing brawl for the bare-knuckle heavyweight
boxing crown in July 1889, between Jake Kilrain and the magnificent John L.
Sullivan. (It went seventy-five rounds--yes, seventy-five rounds!--but
that's another story.) The fight was hidden away in the woods near
Hattiesburg, Mississippi, more than 100 miles from the nearest telegraph
station, in New Orleans. To make matters worse, some 3,000 fans were packed
in around the ring, and no one could move in or out. How was the AP going to
get the news out?

Step one was to charter a private train and have it stand by. Step two was
to equip the ringside fight reporter with "hollow wooden balls that could be
screwed open and shut" (p. 137). The reporter wrote his account of each
round, stuffed it inside a ball, then heaved it to a waiting courier. At the
fight's end, the courier rushed all the copy to the waiting train. As the
train dashed toward New Orleans, the AP found some stowaways on board from
other news outlets. So, the nameless AP man rushed forward to the engine and
cut the other cars loose, allowing him to get to the telegraph first--and
alone.

An episode that was perhaps more emblematic of the hard-news tradition of
journalism involved the Lindbergh flight of 1927. Because the AP had
bureaus, correspondents, and member newspapers all along the route, it was
uniquely well positioned to cover the flight. Everyone along the route was
mobilized. One of the Paris correspondents went out to Bourget Field in
advance and realized that there was only a single pay phone, so he
"arranged" to get a phone line in a private building nearby. Once again, the
AP flashed the news to a waiting world. The moral of the story is not that
it takes a dashing superhero to cover the news but that a little planning
ahead goes a long way.

Another strength of _Breaking News_ is the collection of amazing photos.
They are integrated with the text, so that they appear in context, and the
best of them get their own full page. The Pulitzer Prize-rich photo staff
has taken dozens of iconic photos since the Civil War, and plenty of them
are here: the Iwo Jima flag-raising, the self-immolation of the Buddhist
monk in Saigon, the "napalm girl" in Vietnam, the "tank man" in Tiananmen
Square, the "falling man" at the World Trade Center. There are also some
photos of AP reporters at work.

Especially valuable are the accounts of how such photos were made, which is
usually lacking from pure photo books that reproduce pictures without
contextualizing them. We learn, for example, that in the Saigon bureau in
the 1960s, chief photographer Horst Faas insisted that all the print
reporters take cameras with them whenever they went out in the field. That's
why reporter Malcolm Browne had a camera with him when the monk set himself
ablaze. This approach, which would probably have run afoul of union rules
back home, is now becoming a more common practice in today's convergent
newsrooms, more than forty years later.

_Breaking News_ is also useful as a source for getting the AP's version of
some historic news moments that are still subject to dispute. Who really
reported the first news about Pearl Harbor? What was going on in the JFK
motorcade? Here, the AP tells its side. In addition, the book helps fill a
gap in most histories by pointing out the role the AP played over the
twentieth century in defending freedom of the press and freedom of
information, often by filing lawsuits.

Overall, the book is arranged by topics-- war (two chapters), trials,
Freedom of Information, aviation, sports, elections, civil rights, foreign
reporting, photos, disasters, and the White House. (Oddly, there is no
chapter on business news, which is a pretty significant part of the AP).
This arrangement evokes the reality that these topics are all separate
"beats" in the view of the AP, but at a cost. Even though the chapters are
generally chronological, the topical approach makes it hard to follow the
overall story of the AP from start to finish. Helpfully, there is a "brief
history" (eleven pages) of the AP at the back, written by veteran Walter
Mears.

_Breaking News_, which includes endnotes, reflects a concern about sources.
Many of the older anecdotes are based on Oliver Gramling's mother lode of AP
stories, _AP: The Story of News_ (1940). The authors also make good use of
two essential scholarly studies, Menachem Blondheim's _News over the Wires_
(1994) and Richard Schwarzlose's _The Nation's Newsbrokers_ (1989-1990). As
each chapter approaches the present, more and more use is made of the AP's
corporate archives, which lay almost forgotten in the basement of AP's
landmark headquarters in Rockefeller Center until the company moved in 2004,
as well as oral histories conducted for this project.

In all, _Breaking News_ is a valuable addition to the literature. But (ah,
the "but graf") this book will leave many historians of journalism wishing
for more. It doesn't really meet the standard that Carey was calling for.
His often-quoted call for a history of reporting was part of a larger point:
that a history of reporting should be part of a _cultural_ history of
journalism. Such a history would go beyond the question of "What happened?"
and take up larger questions: Why did people in the past act as they did?
What did their experience feel like to them? What did it all mean?

The authors of _Breaking News_ are very adept at handling 80 percent of the
five W's, especially "what." But in true AP fashion, they shy away from the
"why" question. As a work of history, this is a remarkably unreflective
book.

One episode is indicative: _Breaking News_ proudly tells the story behind
the story of the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1973. An AP
messenger recognized Agnew as he was entering the federal courthouse in
Baltimore to address the charges of corruption. The (nameless) messenger
called the Washington bureau. Reporter Richard Pyle then called Agnew's
office, and a sobbing secretary confirmed the vice president's resignation.
Pyle flashed the news.

The result was the AP got a full half-hour "beat" on everyone else. Which
raises a question, one that is never raised inside AP to the best of my
knowledge, and not raised in this book: So what? The news of Agnew's
announcement was going to be announced in a little while anyway, so what
difference did half an hour make? In a book devoted to an institution
organized around the belief that such "beats" are of transcendent
importance, this question should be at least addressed.

_Breaking News_ is also disappointing in another way. It is fundamentally
misleading about the historical reality of the AP because it focuses so
strictly on news flashes, bulletins, and other earth-shattering events. The
fact is, most days in most bureaus are routine, and this book sidesteps that
reality, which is made up of an endless round of shifts in which stories
from the members are rewritten, correspondents cover meetings with entirely
predictable outcomes, desk supervisors see to the routing of ski conditions
or produce prices to members who can't publish without them, and staffers
take dictation from stringers at Division III college football games. It's
not all V-J Day, prize fights, and trips on Air Force One. History happens
even when all hell is not breaking loose.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, _Breaking News_ does not approach its subject
critically. The authors celebrate their subject and avoid asking whether AP
could be better. The AP is the only news organization in America that covers
every state legislature, every governor, every state supreme court. What do
they have to show for it? The AP is not only the biggest employer of
journalists in the country, it also has a high "churn rate," because people
are always leaving and the AP is constantly hiring new people. How does it
impart skills to them? How does it acculturate them into the values and
traditions of journalism? What is the philosophy or ethos of the place? We
cannot find out from _Breaking News_.

To the AP's credit, this book does make some (brief) admissions. It
acknowledges that the AP was an enabler of racism during the modern civil
rights struggle. It admits that the AP dropped the ball on Watergate.
Reading between the lines, it allows that the AP has had a horrible track
record in hiring women and minorities. (The first black reporter, Austin
Long-Scott, was hired in 1961, and he did not have much company for a long
time.)

But as might be expected of an in-house production, _Breaking News_ pulls
some punches. There is no discussion of the nonprofit cooperative's
governance or finances. There is no criticism of the print and broadcast
"members" who are the AP's ultimate masters. And it's hard to find any
evidence that any AP staffer ever screwed up, arrived late, or spelled a
name wrong.

Finally, this big new book on the AP falls short by not engaging any of the
scholarly, political, or economic debates surrounding the practice of news
gathering. There are only passing references to "objectivity," which would
seem like a fairly central issue for an organization like the AP. Nor is
there any discussion of the AP's role as the ultimate agenda-setter in U.S.
daily news reporting.

In the literature on the history of American journalism, there is no
shortage of books about the _New York Times_, the _New Yorker_, CBS, or a
handful of other hardy perennials. There are shelves full of studies,
memoirs, and anthologies. Yet, the AP remains the elephant in the library.
Although it is, in many ways, the center of gravity in American journalism,
it is still lacking the full-blown cultural history that it deserves.

_Breaking News_ helps, but the definitive study still awaits.

Note

[1]. James Carey, "The Problem of Journalism History," _Journalism History_
1 (Spring 1974): 3-5, 27.