>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Silence ]
>> Beverly Brannan: So welcome, everyone.
Can you hear?   Are they on?
No response.   [Laughter] Okay, good.
Good. I'm Beverly Brannan.
I'm Curator of Photography in the Prints and Photographs Division.
The Prints and Photographs Division has more than 15 million images
and more than half of these -- eight and a half million --
relate to photo journalism.
They were created as documentation of significant events
and were intended for publication in newspapers or magazines.
Two of the largest of these are New York World Telegram and Sun
which is 1 million pictures, and Look magazine which is 5 million.
In addition to newspaper and magazine collections,
the library also excels in news-related formats
such as editorial cartoons; TV and newsreel collections;
personal papers of reporters, editors, and publishers;
and of course, newspapers and magazines themselves.
Despite news and photo journalism being among the library's largest
areas of collecting, they have been underused by scholars.
Delays in careful examination of these sources are due in part
to news people looking ahead rather than looking back.
It takes more of a historian than a reporter
to plumb the depths of these collections.
In previous generations of historians have tended
to be indifferent to images as primary sources.
They usually come to us just to get -- or they would come to us --
just to get a picture to use on the dust jacket
for a book they'd already written.
Another major delay in mastering all of these materials has been the lack
of a comprehensive study of the newspaper itself.
The personal papers, the cartoons, the photos, the broadcasts were --
those are the things that have been generated.
But to put them in context you need a comprehensive study
of newspaper history.
So Professor Daly's publication begins to address this need.
And that is one reason why we in Prints and Photographs are delighted
to co-sponsor this event with the Serials Division.
And now Teri Sierra from Serials Division will introduce our speaker.
[ Pause ]   >> Teri Sierra: Good morning.
I'm so glad to see so many of you here.
It must be you have a passion for journalism as well.
I want to give you just a quick overview of what the Serial
and Government Division does and holds.
And we do have some close ties to Prints and Photographs,
and you'll see why in a moment.
Our primary collections are newspapers.
We probably hold more than 90,000 titles in the collection,
which is US and foreign titles --
at least I'm told that by my section head, the Section Head
for Newspapers, that that's what she believes.
We're exceptionally strong on US newspapers.
All in all, the collection is comprised of more
than a million loose issues.
And if you ever walk into our stacks,
it has that smell -- that newspaper smell.
Very nice.   For some of us it's comforting.
We also have over 750,000 reels of film and more
than 37,000 bound volumes.
We have foreign newspapers that some foreign countries don't have;
they don't have the depth and the strength
that we have in those collections.
People come from all over the world to see the unique materials
and use the unique materials.
We also hold more than 50,000 periodical titles in the division.
And those are current periodicals.
And by current we mean an approximately two years before we
have them bound and sent to the general collections.
Because we are the Serial and Government Publications Division,
we have the collection of US; we're a full depository
for US government documents and the United Nations.
And we still have some European Union documents.
We're not a formal depository.
We don't have an agreement, but we get most of them anyway.
And then we have our gold level collections.
In the library we like to have metals describe the collection.
So if you are bronze you're down there,
but if you're gold you're up here.
And our gold collection has thousands -- literally thousands --
of issues of rare newspapers and our very special collection
of comic books that has probably more than 125,000 issues
at this point and makes it one of the largest in the world.
And then we have our digitized collections.
We are the home of the National Digital Newspaper Program.
And if you are not familiar with that I suggest
that when you go home, turn on your computer,
look for Chronicling America.
It's available free to everyone from anywhere.
I just looked before I came up and we are short of 5 million pages
in Chronicling America, but soon there will be --
we're about to release more.   So we'll be over the 5 million page
of digitized newspapers from 28 states.
So it's a great resource.
It goes from 1936 through -- I'm sorry, 1836 --
to 1922, which is the copyright cutoff.
So thank you for indulging me in telling you that because I love
to use those numbers and let you know particularly the resources
that you can reach from home.
But today we're here to greet Professor Christopher Daly.
Professor Daly is an Associate Professor
of Journalism at Boston University.
And today he will be talking to us about his new book,
Covering America: A Narrative History of the Nation's Journalism.
Professor Daly is a graduate of Harvard University
and holds a master's degree in History
from the University of North Carolina.
He is a veteran journalist,
having worked as the State House Bureau Chief
for the Associated Press in Boston during the 1980s,
and serving as the New England Correspondent
for the Washington Post from 1989 to 1997.
His work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly,
The Columbia Journalism Review, Parents magazine,
We have high hopes for this new book.
And we know it will become a classic.
Right now on our reference area it sits right
above Frank Luther Mott's book, American Journalism,
which is as you all know a classic.
And we believe Professor Daly is onto something here.
So having said that, I'd like to invite Professor Daly to the podium.
[Applause]
>> Christopher Daly: Well, thank you for all the kinds words.
And, you know, I should emphasize that shelving is no accident;
it's really a metaphor in a way for the fact that, you know,
the work that I've done stands on the shoulders of a lot
of researchers who have gone before me and builds on the work
in this field, which, you know, I did not think I would be able to do
without the help of all those other researchers, scholars, synthesizers,
and of course without the great resources here at the library.
So thank you very much for all that.   It's very generous of you.
And it's a treat to be here.
It's an honor to speak at the Library of Congress.
It feels a little bit like talking in church if you are someone
who cares about books and cares about our collective memory.
I also want to thank the library for the magnificent collections
that are here and for the great work that's been done
in digitizing those materials which extends your reach so magnificently,
directly benefits scholars like me and our students.
Particularly I want to thank the American Memory Division,
the Newspapers and Serial Division, and the Prints
and Photographs Division.
Because having all this great material
at my fingertips helped me immeasurably
in writing Covering America.
And most of the images that I'd like to share with you today come
from the Prints and Photographs Division,
at least until my work hit the 1920s
or so when that copyright provision comes into play.
Well, I began this work more than eight years ago.
And incidentally, one of the things I learned
in the process is why our presidents fight so hard for that second term:
It's impossible to accomplish anything significant
in less than eight years.
[Laughter] So I sympathize with them.
One of the conclusions that I came to in this work is that in trying
to understand the news business it's important
to understand the news as a business.
And when I began to look at it that way it became clear to me
that the practice of journalism in America has undergone a number
of significant changes during its long history.
And as I argue in Covering America, these big periods
of time are marked by sudden episodes of rapid change,
then followed typically by periods of stability
or the dominance of a particular trend.
And usually this is driven by an upheaval in the business model
that supports journalism; the change
in that business model has chronically forced a crisis
in the philosophy of journalism or some other part of the business.
So what I was hoping to do today is just begin to sketch out some
of that interpretive framework that informs the book.
The book actually tells a lot of wonderful stories
that I hope you would find interesting and fun to read about.
But to give you a sense of it I've tried to zero in on some part
of each of these five major periods in our history that I identify
and give you a sense or a sample
of what the journalism was like in those periods.
Journalism in America has a long tale to it now, a long history.
And I began to be struck by the fact
that it had a mighty humble beginning in this country.
Indeed, for the first 75 years or so, colonists in America got along
without any homegrown newspapers whatsoever.
And then beginning very tentatively in the early 1700s,
the first English language papers began circulating.
So what I would like to just do is give you a sense
of the overview here and then I want to plunge in briefly to each
of these different periods.
Beginning in that earliest part of the 18th century we can say
without doubt there is a starting point in 1704.
Newspapers for the next century
or more underwent a gradual transformation
from being very timid, apolitical enterprises to being businesses
that were not only flourishing, but were at the heart
of the two-party political system; they became political
over that long sweep of time.
In the next period, as many scholars have pointed out,
American journalism became much more commercial.
It became much more lucrative, a big business.
And by the end of that period of the late 19th century,
the big city dailies were roaring.
And that is the hay day in a sense of the newspaper.
In that next part of the history, in the middle part of the 20th century
from the 1900s to the 1960s or so --
not to say that this professionalization ended then --
but this is a period in which you can see a trend of struggling
to make American journalism more professional.
I mean, I have to condense a lot of ideas here.
But that's the emerging trend that I want to draw our attention to.
Then we can see in the latter part
of the 1960s the business has changed again because what had been
for a long time family-run, small-scale operations become part
of bigger and in some cases, quite vast international corporations.
And then finally, in the very recent period we can see the digitization
of our field causing tremendous upheaval as it is doing
in so many other fields of not only business, but also the arts --
almost every endeavor we can think
of is undergoing this digital revolution
that we're all working through now.
We're in this creative destruction phase if you will.
So overall that's the scheme that I wanted to share with you.
I argue for it in a more scholarly way in the book.
But today I want to just share some of the instances
that would illustrate a lot of these important ideas.
So in this first period we could take as a starting point --
we could do no better than to take as a starting point --
the career of Ben Franklin, the young printer's apprentice
in the early part of the 18th century.
He, by the 1730s, was operating the most successful newspaper
in the colonial era, his Pennsylvania Gazette.
While he was doing that, Franklin did something that many people
who run newspapers eventually end up doing,
which is he pissed some people off.
He published some material that some readers took exception to.
They thought he was mocking some of the local clergy.
Threats were made; subscriptions were going to be canceled.
And all in all, Franklin was in a bit of a crisis.
And in that setting he sat down and sketched out a magnificent statement
of philosophy for journalists, a defense of his trade
that he titled "Apology for Printers".
And this is a good bedrock place to begin
to understand the thinking in our field.
In this Apology for Printers Franklin said, among other things,
that printers are educated in the belief that when men differ
in opinion -- as they are inevitably going to do --
both sides are equally to have the advantage of being heard
by the public and that when truth and error have fair play,
the former is always an overmatch for the latter.
Now, this is typical Franklin in so many ways, but in particularly
that last bit there where he's trying to reassure us that truth
and error can battle it out.
And we should be, you know, serene or confident in the idea that, yes,
truth will always win out.
He doesn't say how long it will take truth to win out [laughter] or,
you know, just when it will come out on top.
But anyway, this is a really interesting argument
that can be boiled down to this idea that journalists serve the public
by opening their pages to conflicting points of view.
And we all benefit from that big, noisy argument that can take place
in newspapers if they are free to do so, if they are --
part of what he's doing is arguing here against censorship.
But that's a bedrock statement of philosophy for American journalism
and we have Franklin to thank for it.
It was part of a bigger process that led to a bolder and bolder approach
to journalism, one that Franklin himself helped advance
by creating one of the first editorial cartoons we can recognize
in our history.
This was an image that Franklin created to try
to encourage the separate English colonies
in this part of the world to unite.
Now, this was not a revolutionary era cartoon;
it was actually a little before that in the 1750s urging them to unite
for their common defense.   In that same general period of time,
more printers became more politicized in part
because of the actions of the British Crown.
Notoriously in 1765 when the British put a tax on paper,
printers went bananas and announced the end of journalism.
Here's a great image in which the Editor
of the Pennsylvania Journal -- not Franklin, but another one --
you know, decorated his front page
like a tombstone and said: This is it.
This is the end of journalism.
This tax is going put us out of business.
And instead of the official tax, the stamp that was supposed to prove
that the tax has been paid, there's that skull and cross bones
in the upper right there.
And the newspaper announced that it is expiring in hopes
of resurrection to life again.
Well, happily this was a premature announcement
of the death of journalism.
Journalism continued and in fact became more political
and more polarized throughout this period of the 1760s and 1770s.
Part of the credit for that goes to Paul Revere who created this image,
an engraving of the Red Coats mowing
down the supposedly innocent citizens of Boston,
including even a dog in the foreground there
to really work on our sympathies.
As we know, in this period the greatest polemicist of the era,
Tom Paine, advanced this idea that journalism could make arguments
in public and push truth into the ring with error.
Paine emerges along with the other members of his generation --
Jefferson and the other founders --
as people who saw the practice of journalism right at the center
of the ideal of self-government.
And in fact, we want to always give a nod to Jefferson for insisting
on the primacy of press freedom in this new experiment
in self-government, and of course for insisting
that we include the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights.
I think it's a fascinating question to then look
at how journalists behaved in this new society with this guarantee
of freedom, with the prestige that came from being written
into the Constitution itself.
How did they exercise this new-found freedom
and the responsibility that would go with it?
Well, we know that, sadly, they went a little crazy and engaged
in a level of partisanship and a politics of personal destruction,
the likes of which we really haven't actually seen again.
I mean, you know this idea that journalists are partisan
or that they are taking sides, or are biased, this is a --
you know, a charge that gets a lot of exercise these days.
But it's not new and it's one that, you know, in the early days
of our history would not have been even recognized as a problem.
In fact, most of the people engaged in journalism in this period thought
that their purpose in life was to advance a political agenda;
it was not to stay on the sidelines or to be neutral.
So no better example than that --
than the reason for the limit on the career of Alexander Hamilton,
someone who all the founders acknowledged as the most able
and talented of the whole gang.
And they all expected him to be President,
but as you know he never was.
The reason for that is a journalist of the time, James Callender,
decided that he was going to join the cause of the other side
in the great argument going on then around the issue of Federalism.
And when Callender arrived in the new United States,
he was a man of some talent as a writer.
He was also a man of great thirst that seemed to afflict a whole lot
of the journalists that I came across during this period.
[Laughter] He was struggling to make ends meet as he arrived
in Philadelphia alone without his family.
Eventually his family came over and joined him.
I want to just share a little bit of what he did next.
He moved his family onto Philadelphia's docks
and began drinking more heavily than ever.
At the time, of course,
most Americans drank what we would consider prodigious amounts
of alcohol from sunup to sunset.
With a shortage of clean drinking water, most people drank beer,
hard cider, or whiskey as part of their daily diet.
Even in that setting those in the newspaper trade were known
to have an especially strong thirst,
and among them Callender's was perhaps the most unquenchable
of all.
Nevertheless, he managed to make himself useful
to the anti-Federalist or Republican cause, writing pamphlets in support
of Jefferson and his allies.
In July 1797, Callender tackled one of the stars in the Federalist camp,
Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.
In a lengthy pamphlet Callender revealed
that Hamilton had transferred money
to a convicted swindler named James Reynolds and insinuated
that Hamilton and Reynolds were scheming to speculate
in Treasury certificates, which were then naturally
under Hamilton's supervision.
This accusation forced Hamilton to reply publicly -- which he did --
denying all charges of financial chicanery.
But in order to explain those money transfers, he had to confess
that he was actually having an affair with Reynolds' wife, Maria.
[Laughter] The money that was transferring
to Mr. Reynolds was blackmail money intended to keep him
from telling the story of Hamilton's liaisons with his wife.
Callender was unimpressed by this explanation,
and in a follow-up article he continued to mock Hamilton, quote --
James Callender now -- "The whole proof rests upon an illusion.
I am a rake, and for that reason I cannot be a swindler."
[Laughter] And in any case, the damage was done
and Hamilton was finished as a political figure,
thus clearing the way for Callender's actual ally Jefferson
to win the election of 1800.
Now, there's another -- there's a part B to that story that I urge you
to follow up in the book
because Hamilton was not Callender's only victim;
Callender later turned on Jefferson himself.
But what I want to do is jump to the next major period in this scheme
of mine and talk about the era
in which newspapers become primarily focused on the business side of it,
and begin to redefine the meaning of success in the newspaper business.
The new standard, the new ideal will be: How many papers are you selling
and how much money are you making in doing that?
So in this more commercialized period we can see the rise first
of the penny press in the decades before the Civil War
and in the decades after the Civil War,
the era of what's known as yellow journalism.
One person whose career embodies this change quite dramatically is
this man, Benjamin Day, was not only someone who founded a newspaper,
but he invented a new kind of newspaper.
And therefore we need to really pay attention to him.
In 1833 Benjamin Day launched a paper
in New York City that he called The Sun.
And his motto for The Sun, significantly,
was that "It shines for all."
And that is Day was trying to signal that he wanted to sell his newspaper
to every single person in New York.
He was not satisfied to just put his newspaper into the hands
of the literate elites who had been the typical audience
for most newspapers most of the time before that, and he was not content
to just reach Whigs or Democrats or Republicans;
his goal was to reach everyone.
And in doing this, he was busy creating the first truly mass
medium, one that was going to reach the middling and laboring ranks
of society as well as those at the top.
To do that he needed to go down market
and he start selling his paper on a whole new basis.
He sold it for a dramatically low price of a penny a day.
But even more significantly, he said,
"To get my paper you don't have to subscribe for six
or twelve months at a time."
You don't have to come up with that one big payment.
This meant that the working people of New York could plunk
down a penny today if they had it and if they were
so inclined, and maybe not tomorrow.   Now, this is a big change not only
because it means more people can afford the paper,
but it feeds right back into the editorial thinking behind the paper
because it puts a pressure on Mr. Day to do something
that hadn't been considered part of journalism before this,
to be interesting every day.
Otherwise, those people are going to skip buying his paper today;
they're under no obligation to do so.
They could pass right by the shop,
or eventually pass the shouting newsboys in the streets
and not plunk down their pennies
if they didn't think it would be worth their while.
So here we have a brand new definition of journalism in America:
To be interesting every day.
Now, Benjamin Day quickly figured out that if he was going to do
that he was going to run himself ragged trying
to find new material every day, and he also therefore gets credit
for hiring the first full-time reporter
that I can find any evidence of at an American newspaper --
a tragically obscure figure named George Wisner,
who had been an unemployed journeyman printer who Day found
and gave the task of going out into the streets of New York
and finding out interesting stuff.
To give you an example of the kind of stuff that Day and Wisner found
and put in their paper, here's a very brief item.
But this was a complete telling of this item,
which was mercifully short: "A William Scott
from Center Market was brought up for assaulting Charlotte Gray,
a young woman with whom he lived.
The Magistrate, learning that they never were married,
offered the prisoner a discharge on condition
that he would marry the injured girl, who was very willing
to withdraw the complaint on such terms."
Well, Mr. Scott, the defendant, cast a sheep's eye toward the girl,
and then looking out the window gave the jail a melancholy survey.
[Laughter] He then gave the girl another look and was hesitating
as to which he should choose -- a wife or a prison?
The Magistrate insisted on an immediate answer.
At length he concluded that he quote "might
as well marry the critter" close quote,
and they left the office apparently satisfied.
Now, there we have, you know, an almost perfect example
of a certain kind of anecdote, you know, complete with the, you know,
humorous ending and all the rest.
And leaving aside a lot of the, you know, gender assumptions
that are built into it and all the rest.
What we can see through this into the practice of journalism is
that Day and Wisner and their followers were discovering
that ordinary life of unfamous people could be interesting
to others.
And they tapped into this huge vein of the doings of ordinary people.
They also, of course, loaded on as much, you know, sex and crime
and violence as they could find.
And it turned out New York City was an endless source of those kinds
of things and there was a vast and growing audience for it.
It's right idea, right place, right time;
all of these things come together in the career of Benjamin Day
and his rivals and successors, James Gordon Bennett
at The Herald and others.
Now, for the balance of this period that --
I have so many things I'd love to talk about --
but I want to just emphasize
that news is becoming much faster during this period thanks
to the telegraph and some dramatic innovations in printing.
The telegraph becomes a huge issue in the coverage of the Civil War.
Journalism is slowly becoming more visual during this period as well.
Here's an image -- thank you to the library --
of Mathew Brady's own photo wagon during the Civil War.
It's hard to make this out unless you have the really high resolution
version right in front of you.
But the gentlemen seated on the ground are sharing what looks
like an enormous ham bone or turkey leg.
They're actually taking a break there from their photo duties --
things you learn by being able to see the originals.
I said news was getting more visual, part of that was driven
by the demands of the war and the growing interest in publishing maps.
Sorry, I got to go the other way.
Now, after the war you see another explosion in American journalism
in this form of yellow journalism -- that practiced by --
preeminently by -- Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.
And in their great rivalry they drove each other to extremes
in pursuit of exclusives.
Here's a wonderful image of newsboys right
across the street selling their papers by the Capitol.
Pulitzer and Hearst took the ideas of Benjamin Day and elevated them
to probably their logical conclusion: They added new features
like cartoons; women's pages; pages devoted to coverage
of sporting events; games; puzzles; recipes;
really essentially anything they could think of,
and then judged the results by the one test that truly mattered
to them -- that was the test of the marketplace --
if things were popular, if they sold papers they could stay;
if they weren't, out they went.
Anything to reach the broadest possible audience.
And by 1899 Hearst and Pulitzer were selling more
than a million copies a day.
To help reach those masses they naturally flooded the streets
with those newsboys to shout the headlines,
but they had to first cook them up.
They really found the ultimate challenge being
to find something amazing, stupendous every day.
Which, you know, life does not always provide us alas.
And so in some cases they were not above making things happen,
the ultimate example being our war with Spain.
I don't want to overstate the role of these newspapers in causing
that war, but they certainly contributed to a climate
in which Americans were suspicious of Spain, its policies, its tactics,
and even its very people.
Here's an instance, this is the front page
from Hearst's New York Journal on the day
that the USS Maine was blown up in Havana Harbor.
Hearst had no concern about determining the truth of the matter,
the real cause of the explosion.
He was off to the races with this completely imaginary illustration
and the $50,000 reward which was coming out of his own pocket.
This was not a government-issued reward for information;
this is Hearst, you know, making something interesting for him
to put on his front page.
And fascinating to compare, really literally side by side here,
this is The New York Times front page
from the same day covering the same story.
And as an indication here that there is another ideal,
another philosophy also at work here in American journalism,
and that's the one I want to talk about next
because the New York Times is an embodiment of an approach
to journalism that is more shall we say responsible, more serious,
sometimes duller visually and literarily, but nevertheless,
you know, represents an idea that journalism serves the public
by providing not just ripping yarns or amusing anecdotes,
but by providing timely, useful information that has been vetted
and verified and ideally, you know,
confirmed in a responsible, systematic way.
And with this we get the idea
that maybe journalism could become a profession.
And some of the credit for this idea,
for the early momentum behind this idea goes to Pulitzer himself.
Pulitzer had something of a hangover after the Spanish-American War
and a, you know, an attack of conscience.
And he decided to provide in his will for a huge endowment
to Columbia University for two purposes: One was to found a school
of journalism which just recently had his name attached to it,
and the other was to administer those prizes
in journalism that bear his name.
Both of those provisions in his will had the same ultimate goal,
which was to elevate the practice of journalism in the United States.
And in doing this he was part of the next great trend, a long --
and I have to say uneven -- campaign to make journalism
into a true profession along the lines of law or medicine.
The problem of course, if you can call it that --
that we run into quite quickly in this --
is that First Amendment
because Congress can make no law abridging the freedom of the press.
It has never been possible to truly professionalize journalism
in the United States, at least not with the kind
of government-backed system of testing and licensure and policing
of the field that is done in medicine or law.
And it's done in journalism in some other countries.
There are other countries in which journalists are licensed,
but not here.
In this country, for better or worse,
journalism has remained wide open.
You become a journalist by going around and asking questions,
or simply by having an audience.
And it has never been more complicated than that.
Although actually I should say that with the coming of radio
in the 1920s and with television in the 1950s as popular media,
the realm of broadcasting has always been a regulated activity governed
by the FCC.
The government doesn't choose or license the actual contents
of broadcasts, but it does play a regulatory role
and for many decades Congress has been using the Federal
Communications Commission to enforce this idea
that broadcasters should operate in the public interest --
a suitably vague phrase that we've been arguing over for decades.
But that is the idea.
Now, I do want to emphasize that even without an official system
of licensing and all the rest --
there are some great images of our great broadcasters --
there have been successes
in improving the performance of American journalism.
At mid-century we can see this in the really moving work done
by no less a figure than Ernie Pyle.
Pyle came to me in my research as a hero I didn't really know I had.
And so much I could say about him,
but I think I'll let his words speak for him.
I want to share with you a work of his that I consider a masterpiece.
Dated January 10th 1944 during the Italian campaign,
this column by Ernie Pyle tells the story of the evacuation of the body
of a dead captain on a moonlit night as he wrote,
"Dead men have been coming down the mountain all evening,
lashed onto the backs of mules.
They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack saddle.
The first one came early in the morning.
They slid him down from the mule.   Then a soldier came into the cowshed
and said there were some more bodies outside.
We went out into the road.
Four mules stood there in the moonlight.
In the road where the trail came down off the mountain the soldiers
who led them were waiting.
'This one is Captain Waskow,' one of them said quickly.
The uncertain mules moved off to their olive grove.
The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave.
They stood around and gradually I could sense them moving one
by one close to Captain Waskow's body -- not so much to look,
I think, as to say something in finality to him and to themselves.
I stood close by," Pyle wrote, "and I could hear.
One soldier came and looked down and he said out loud, 'God damn it.'
Another one came and he said, 'God damn it to hell anyway.'
He looked down for a few last moments and then turned and left.
Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down
and took the Captain's hand.
And he sat there for a full five minutes holding the dead hand
in his own and looking intently into the dead face.
And he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.
Finally, he put the hand down.
He reached up and gently straightened the points
of the Captain's shirt collar.
And then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges
of his uniform around the wound.   And then he got up and walked away,
down the road in the moonlight all alone."
Now, there I would say is a masterpiece of the power
of being there first of all, the power of a trained observer,
and the power of the spare style that is a masterpiece
of understatement in the hands of one of the greatest.
I think we could also see
in this general time period this continuing effort
to professionalize the field taking many different forms,
but a lot of them having to do with something else that's continuing
to emerge during the 20th century and that is the profitability
of journalism, particularly in not just the big city newspapers,
but also in the medium-sized city newspapers,
more and more of which were monopolies by the middle and late --
especially the later -- part of the 20th century, giving them resources
with which, yes, they could try to raise their standards;
they could offer better pay; they could employ "college boys,"
you know, as the phrase was; and begin to employ specialists,
people with specialized beats like science and medicine and law
and these kinds of things.
And this trend reached some kind of a zenith I think, in my opinion
and the opinion of many people, in the 1960s during the coverage
of the War in Vietnam when American journalism finally established its
independence from the national government.
And then in two very important instances that I go
into in great length in the book -- the Pentagon Papers Case of 1971
and of course the Watergate Scandal of 1972, 3, and 4.
And I want to read a reflection on this period
that I think is quite astute.
And it comes from Steve Coll, a veteran journalist,
a veteran of the Washington Post and now The New Yorker magazine.
In testimony before Congress in the 1990s, Coll observed this:
"Uniquely in the history of journalism,
the United States witnessed the rise of large independently-owned,
constitutionally-protected, civil service-imitating newsrooms,
particularly after the 1960s.
These newsrooms and the culture of independent-minded
but professional reporting within them were
in many respects an accident of history.
At newspapers demographic, economic,
and technological factors created an era
of quasi-monopolistic business models.
To preserve their quasi-monopolies,
owners of these properties had incentives to create journalism
that would be seen as credible and attractive
by the greatest numbers of readers.
Thus, the owners invested in quote 'objective
politically-neutral reporting.'
They also enjoyed high profit margins
that allowed the more public-minded among them to invest
in expensive foreign bureaus, national bureaus,
and investigative teams."
Well, alas, I think I have to say that was something
of a high watermark for American journalism.
And the last couple of decades have been much more troubled.
I'm thinking about what I call this fourth era in the news business
in which news organizations, because of that profitability,
became very attractive to bigger businesses
and sometimes became attractive to businesses that had nothing to do
with journalism, businesses that made jet engines, or refrigerators,
or light bulbs, or things like that.
And they became part of a large internationally-traded network
of corporations.
You know, you may say this was like a Baroque phase of that other,
longer period and that's a nice arguable point kind of thing,
you know, we could entertain discussions about.
But I do think that significant to see a change in the basic model
of journalism being changing in this period
for being a family-run operation, to being parts of larger
and ever-larger corporations.
To keep an eye on the clock here, I also want to just mention
that another theme in the book involves the rise of news media,
mostly newspapers and magazines in the early days, serving in parallel
with these other trends specialized audiences.
I'm thinking of newspapers and magazines devoted
to African-Americans; to other minority groups; to labor unions
and working people; to people united by different languages --
this has been a rich story that parallels the main story
that I've been talking about up till now.
But I do want to share with you one of my favorite parts of this story,
and that is the rise of something really amazing.
You know, I talk through the book about the origins
of the African-American press beginning in 1827 with the founding
of a newspaper called Freedom's Journal.
I trace a lot of the major developments, including the rise
of the business phenomenon known as Johnson Publishing,
which put out such titles as Ebony and Jet.
Above all though, there is Oprah, the ultimate -- let me get to her,
here we go -- high-impact, cross-over,
all-platform media mogul.
So vast is her reputation, so familiar her likeness,
so pervasive her reach that she can be identified by just one name
like Cronkite or Cleopatra.
Every weekday for 25 years she had a chat with the millions
of American viewers of her TV show -- mostly women, mostly white,
and millions more in the 119 other countries
where it appeared or continues to appear.
Every month her magazine, O, promises to coach readers
on how to live your best life.
When she endorses a book, it invariably rockets
onto the best-seller list.
Author, editor, publisher, broadcaster, tastemaker,
entrepreneur -- her numbers certainly testify
to the arrival of black media.
On the strength of her media interests -- those that she owned --
she became the first African-American woman
on the Forbes magazine list of wealthiest Americans.
Her ratings, sales, and earnings were so vast at her peak
that they made the case for at least the beginnings
of a post-racial media universe in America.
Even Oprah never could have amassed such a record if it were based
on African-American readers or viewers alone.
From the start she appealed across the color line.
And finally, let me observe about this period that we're in now,
which is always a difficult thing to do for people in all walks of life,
but particularly dangerous for historians because not a whole lot
of time has gone by and it's hard to see these more recent periods
in quite the clarity that we hope for in the earlier ones.
But in this most recent period beginning in about the 1990s
and certainly by the year 2000, we can see a decisive break from a lot
of past practices thanks to this digital revolution
that has changed everything about our business.
It has brought deep convulsive change to journalism and done
so on a scale equal to that of any other crisis
that we've been through in the past.
Since that Stamp Tax in the 1750s, or since the coming
of the penny press in the 1830s, journalism has continually --
or sporadically I should say -- been challenged to reinvent itself
to adapt to changing times.
Today, I'm happy to say, the digital revolution is at the same time
that it is causing a crisis in a lot of the older legacy media,
it is opening up tremendous new opportunities.
We can see this in a couple of ways.
One is we can see that journalists today have much better tools
at our disposal.
In fact, I have better tools right here in my pocket
Also we see a dramatic change in the economics of our business,
most notably in the decline -- almost to zero --
of the cost of getting into the business,
the cost of launching a new news-oriented website.
Some of the younger people
in this room probably could have launched one
in the time it's taken me to give this talk.
You could have started with nothing and you could be online now
with your own new website.
You could call it "Covering America" if you wanted to.
I haven't done that.
And you don't need to spend the billion dollars that it took
to launch USA Today for example.
You know, you could start one with your laptop.
And I want to just leave you, not with these images declaring the end
of journalism and the doom and gloom of the last couple years,
but instead -- this is one of the most chilling images for anybody
like me who came up on the newspaper side of the news business.
These are all unneeded used coin boxes
that newspapers used to be sold from.
And the concern was of course that, you know,
news would become irresponsible --
oh my god, as if it had never been irresponsible before.
But what I do want to -- tip of the hat here to some
of the real pioneers in the online only version of journalism
that I do think is going to be an important part of the future.
So first of all, Arianna Huffington who took --
well, it was for her a modest investment of only
about a million dollars coupled with some later pools of investment money
from other people and built something
out of essentially nothing.
The Huffington Post, for all of its problems
and the criticisms that's been leveled at it, is a going concern.
It is a money-making operation.
She herself recently cashed out to the tune of $315 million.
So way to go, Arianna.
And finally, I want to ask you the question: Why is this man smiling?
This is Joshua Micah Marshall, the founder of the Talking Points Memo,
a sharply-politicized news and opinion website.
And part of the reason he's smiling is he's having his picture taken
here by the New York Times, which was sort
of officially acknowledging his arrival as a serious journalist
after his website won the Polk Award for its investigative journalism.
But also he's smiling, I think,
because he employs all those people behind him.
They all work for him on the basis of money that he is making online.
He is proving that indeed there is a future for news in America.
And since this photo was taken a couple of years ago,
the size of that newsroom staff --
these are full-time journalists making money
in an online journalistic operation -- has more than doubled.
There's a lot more of them today than there were
in the background of that picture.
So I want to leave you with the thought
that despite the creative destruction, despite the layoffs,
despite the trauma that a lot of the older news media are going
through today, there is a future for journalism in America,
even if we just play out the existing trends.
I don't want to be a prognosticator here but I think we can see
that we are going to make it at least into the near future:
We see on college campuses, like the one where I teach,
young people flocking into journalism; we see new sites opening
up all the time on the web; and I do think
that there will be a great future in continuing to find stuff out
and share that with an audience.
Now, I'd be happy to keep this discussion going.
I'd love to hear your thoughts, take any questions you might have.
[ Applause ]   Thank you.
>> I wanted to remind you that if you participate
in the short question and answer period we have now, you are agreeing
to let your voice and picture be included in the library's recording.
So I think --
>> Christopher Daly: So you may be going
down in history here if you're not careful.
Here, thank you.   >> Microphone?
No? Yes?
>> Christopher Daly: Mic for questions.
I'd be happy to restate it.   Yep. Okay.
>> Really enjoyed it.   Two questions.
One about truth and, you know, that now we have journalists
who are fact checkers, the Washington Post has something,
there are Pinocchio's, and I'm wondering if --
>> Christopher Daly: Pants on fire, the whole -- yes.
We have a new vocabulary.   >> Where you see this going?
Do you think it's perhaps going
to encourage people maybe not to go up [inaudible].
That's one question.
Second one is as far as correspondents in America
over the time that your book covers and whether people in the states
in America could read foreign newspapers.
Of course in the early days you have the problem of transportation.
But I wonder if you talk about this in your book at all.
>> Christopher Daly: I do a little bit.
There's a wonderful book called Journalism's Roving Eye,
which is a history of Americans doing foreign correspondence.
It's by a man whose name includes Maxwell and Alexander and Hamilton.
I forget what order they're in, but it's a wonderful book.
And that would be a really great place to go for that.
I mean, sadly, in recent years the trend has been for many --
not all -- but many American news organizations
to close their overseas bureaus.   And that's a lamentable loss.
But it has to be said against some gains as well.
There are new and in fact there's a wonderful new operation based
in Boston called Global Post that is attempting to fill some
of that vacuum with an online only model that is working pretty well.
Global Post hires Americans,
they're certainly English speakers who've lived in America
for a good while who are happen to be living overseas.
Now, they're not sending their own people over there
and renting bureau space for them and paying their housing
and all that, but if they're over there and if they have the skills
and they feel like contributing.
And so in this way they've got a foreign correspondent, you know,
workforce numbering in I think the high dozens by now,
maybe in the low hundreds.
So, you know, that's an interesting new model that's going on.
You're also asking about fact-checking.
This could be a whole topic onto itself.
Here's a short version.
In the 1920s Time Magazine pioneered the idea
of having fact-checking done -- was initially done by recent graduates
of Wellesley and places like that who would then reconfirm the things
that the Time correspondents in the field had reported,
and make sure that the rewrite desk in New York didn't introduce errors
in the process of homogenizing all that stuff.
The New Yorker followed suit shortly after that,
built a famous fact-checking department --
although not a perfect one, not a flawless one.
I think what we're seeing today is a new phase of this
in which old-line journalistic institutions,
like the Washington Post, are segregating the act of fact-checking
in a way that I think is a little odd honestly
because it raises the question: Well, why isn't the main article
on this topic fact-checked itself?
Why should that be outsourced to another person down the hall
or to a separate organization entirely?
Why isn't all journalism fact checked initially?
So I think we may find very soon that this worm is going
to turn again and that specialization
of fact-checking will become internalized again.
Just a thought.   Other questions?
Comments? Yes, here.
>> Well, it seems like now in the digital age, you know,
journalists are trying to get their headlines out as soon as possible.
So it kind of changes the aim of journalism I guess in a way.
And I was wondering if you think that in opinion articles
like editorials and op-ed columns, if you think that the principle
that we find in the first era of journalism that you mentioned
when news becomes political and where journalists are trying to --
or their aim is more geared toward expressing their conflicting views.
I guess I was wondering if [inaudible] the editorials
and that [inaudible] original principle is still retained.
>> Christopher Daly: Sure.
Well, you know, I do think it's important to recall that the version
of journalism that was familiar to the founders of the country --
the one that was enshrined in the Constitution -- was a very shrill,
polemical kind of journalism.   It was not fact-based.
In fact, you know, the role
of the reporter hadn't even been invented yet.
So when the founders decided that a free
and independent press was important enough to write
into the Constitution, they had
in mind the only model they were familiar with,
which was one that was mainly consisted of essays and arguments
and sometimes satire and mockery.
But it was all from a very strong point of view.
It was also, it should be pointed out,
a journalism that was small scale.
Each participant in journalism, whether it be a newspaper,
or even something more casual like a one-off, like a pamphlet,
were done on a small scale: They were local;
they were owned separately; there was no such thing as a chain
or a conglomeration of things -- that's what they were -- -
they were really protecting something more
like an individual voice expressing an individual thought or point
of view, something I think much closer in spirit to a blog today
than to, you know, a giant operation like Time Warner or,
you know, Hearst Publications.   That's more what they had in mind.
Here.
>> So considering the changes journalism has gone through,
I guess how do you define journalism now as far as --
I mean, is it this kind of fuller standard
that you can call yourself a journalist, or is it the kind
of post, AP code of ethics [inaudible]?
>> Christopher Daly: Right, right.   >> [Inaudible]
>> Christopher Daly: Right.   I would say it's a great big jumble
of different things going on at the same time.
And I think it will be the job of future historians to look back
and say, "All that jumble in the early part
of the 21st century turned into something."
We don't know where it's going yet.
This is what, you know, this is what life is like.
I mean, people in that penny press era did not wake up on a morning
in 1833 and say, "I'm living in a new era and I get
where it's going," you know?
[Laughter] I mean, that's not historically, you know, realistic.
So I think, you know, it's our fate to live in our own times
and to muddle through them as best we can.
I don't pretend to know how it's all going to shake out.
I have enough trouble with the past, never mind the future.
Here?   >> [Inaudible]
>> Christopher Daly: Can we take one more?
>> Unfortunately -- can be this be our last question then, but --
>> Can you go back to very, very beginning?
What is the first impetus for a sort of press was really commercial
because needed a vehicle for advertising and so forth
and then the political element became part of that
and perhaps dominated it in that century?
>> Christopher Daly: Yes, that's a very important point.
Maybe I didn't make that clear enough.
But when I talk about that first period
in which news becomes more political, well, it becomes that way
from a starting point that is mostly not political at all.
In fact, in the very earliest papers in the 1704
to 1730s period they're filled with commercial news, news about comings
and goings of ships,
the availability of commodities for sale.
You know, if you live in a place like Boston, or Charleston,
or Baltimore, and a shipload of indigo arrives, well,
that's pretty big news because there was no indigo for sale probably
in your colony the previous couple of months.
So that kind of thing filled a lot of those pages,
as well as some top-down proclamations from the governors
and the legislatures of those colonies, and recycled news
that printer editors would grab out of newspapers
as they arrived from Europe.
There's lots of news in those papers about the doings in Russia,
in the German principalities --
almost all of it late and almost all of it wrong.
But still, because it was new to everybody, it was still information
that you could act on and that was valuable.
It's a very humble beginnings.
It's a great experience to go back and look at the earliest newspapers.
>> Okay. So in the interest of keeping
with the library's regulations about these programs,
we need to close it down now.
But there are books for sale in the back
and you can continue discussions with the author back there.
But thank you.   [ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.