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Chapter 1 (part 1)

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 9 months ago

Comments and Discussion:

Add comments, notes and translations here.

 

The contents are inside of and part of the FORM.

Readers think they're seeing only the content, without paying attention to the form.

There are invisible rules when readers read the newspaper. Reading the newspaper, people know where to find information, because editors follow a rigid pattern.

For example, the New York Times is always the same newspaper, even though the articles change every day.

 

The distinction between people and public. People are individuals, and public is more than the sum of individuals. The press relates more to the public. In Italy, the distinction comes out when the newspaper speaks to the public, but the journalists are unaware of the conditions of the people.

 

Form includes layout and design and typography and illustration -- the obvious visual aspects. But it also includes kinds of reporting and departmentalization (organization)

 

The form has changed over the years -- form has a history.

 

Form encompases everything about how the newspaper wants to present "conditions of production".

 

Also the newspaper has a story-like the form-from the colonial era to present

 

The newspaper is an instrument of democracy;the deliberation is the soul of democracy=>newspapers support deliberation by transmitting information to the individuals.

 

MEDIUM-a complicated network of relationships, it mediates and relates the other things.

 

The newspaper is a collection of disparate actors--reporters, editors, production staff.

 

Press really "controls" the people utilising the TRUISMS: PRESS IS THE EYES AND EARS OF THE WORLD; THE PRESS IS THE RESTLESS ADVERSARY OF CORRUPTION; THE PRESS IS THE PALLADIUM OF LIBERTY...

 

Kevin: Is controls too strong a word for this? Politicians and others also use these phrases to push the press in one direction or another. In any case, these notions are out there in the culture and circulate with an extra push from newspersons. At the least, journalists use these phrases to defend their actions (whether justifiable or not).

 

____Why are the photographers separated by the writers?

 

Kevin: I'm not sure what this questions means. Can you clarify?

 

The first newspapers in America were the first colonial printing trades.

At first, the printer was kinda' everything: publisher, editor, reporter, printer.

 

Typography was, is and will be like in the old times, the dominant face of news, only with the exception that the newspaper is an interaction between photos and pieces of text.

Modern newspapers encourage the reader to be objective and to check each situation.

 

Kevin: Hmmm... Objective? I rather thought papers tried to play that role, and projected (or hailed to) a subjective audience.

 

I liked the concept of Baconian understanding: KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!!!

-it's true: the power of mind and of thoughts is beyond human knowledge; a study has

proved that people from Atlantida were using their brain almost 90%, while we are using only 18%-so, no one can take the power of your mind!!

 

Kevin: Please cite the study. What is Atlantida? I'm unfamiliar with this but would like to know more ...

 

Gabriela, I agree with you.. and I would like to add that, in my point of view, the problems begin when some people overrate its mind and its capacity to use it..

However, like you, I think that press has changed its form and its characters during these centuries, without lose its main role: a controller for every field of present, past and obviously future society, like culture, politics, and so on...

That's why I'm really worried in front of "some" commixture between press, politics and industry, because here we lose that idea (or utopia?) of freedom that everybody would like to see when we read newspapers or watch tv..

 

?? “controller for every field of present, past and obviously future society, like culture, politics, and so on...”

You overvalue the importance of newspaper and other media in our society, probably they never covered this role, although they always pretend to do so. I’m not talking about “utopia” as well because I don’t believe we need neutrality from newspapers, we only need “honesty” and clear understanding of the content, we don’t want them to hide a final objective, if they have one. I accept to read a straight opinion different then mine, just I require clarity: I want to know who’s in the back (if there is somebody), who is paying the bill, either Mr. B or which political party is behind the press, the TV and so on. This will be already a big step to self-determination of individuals.

 

%%%The strong relation between press, politics institutions and public opinion is something we cannot ignore.

During these last years a repeating and superficial journalism has imposed its logic to the big old media, too (”New York Times“, ”CBS“). This kind of journalism, that we can call pills of journalism, demonstrated its power during the Gulf War, when Diana Spencer died (1997), with the Clinton-Lewinski scandal (1998), during the Balkan War. This new global information machine is characterized by its speediness but also by the repetition of the images and by the predictability of the subjects, more and more influenced by the logic of the show. CNN success has changed the panorama of world journalism; information at continuous cycle killed traditional news cycles. We have been witnesses to the decrease of the importance between serious and scandal-mongering press.

 

____

 

Redirected from the front page:

The newspaper is a very important instrument of communication not only in the United states but also Italy. It is the oldest and best understood mass medium, subject of many histories, scholarly treatments, political and scientific debates, analysis.

 

My question is -

Medium means something that connects things among them, so a newspaper puts together sources of news with readers, in other words it transfers news and imagines to the readers.

 

 

 

Barbara :

From my point of view, the newspaper have always played an important role in our lives. Although the recent developments and affluences of the Internet and technologies as a news source, newspaper have always been the primary source of current events in the world.

I think that in spite of the newspapers are part of our daily routine in most lives, people know very little of their huge and immense history. Few people wonder when the first newspapers appeared and what the reasons are. How they developed in the space of the years and so on.

Thank to this book I could get to know about the history of newspapers, the evolution and the difficult course a newspaper faced up during the years. This book explores the connection between the newspaper form and democratic culture, it analyzes the history of news form over the long course of its development in the USA from colonial to the present. Before starting to speak about the form of news, the book reports that any medium constitutes a complicated network of relationships. I completely agree to say a newspaper links sources of news with readers. I like the definition of circuit that it means : the world makes news, the newspaper reports it, the public consumes it. This point makes me think over and I want to add that as the world makes news as people make history. Without people, newspaper wouldn’t exist. The world of news could be described as “ uninterrupted circuit “ that it never stop.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE FORM OF NEWS

Style, Production & Social Meaning, 1750-2000

 

The newspaper has always been a privileged form of communication in the United States. Law accords it a seriousness often denied other media, and popular culture endorses its power to expose and enlighten. Although the content of the newspaper often faces criticism as biased or sensationalized or silly, the form of the newspaper is almost sanctified. One might say that the form supplies the standard against which the content is measured.

 

Newspaper form derives its sanctity from its relationship to civic culture. Thinkers endowed the newspaper with a special role in supporting the public conversation of the American republic at a very early point in the nation's history - at a point when newspapers were really incapable of playing that role. Norms arose from this expectation, however, and inflected the design and development of the newspaper, giving it an iconic status it still enjoys, even though it has long since discarded many of its civic responsibilities. Very little in a modern newspaper enacts or even recounts political debate, but Americans still like to think that democracy is rooted in deliberation (is it any more? has it ever been?) and that the newspaper helps make deliberation possible.

 

This book explores the connections between the newspaper form and democratic civic culture. It does so by taking on the history of newspaper form over the long course of its development in the United States from the colonial era to the present. It takes seriously the sanctity that the newspaper has commanded as an instrument of democracy, and asks how and when it has lived up to its mission, how and whether it has reconciled its sacred political work with its profane commercial operation, and how it might be reworked in a changing media environment. Throughout we presume that deliberation is the soul of democracy.

 

There are many ways of thinking about deliberation (as there are many ways of thinking about democracy), and some suit the newspaper (real or imagined) better than others. One prevailing sense, especially among communication scholars, is that newspapers support deliberation by transmitting information to people, who in turn feed back preferences in various ways--votes, of course, but also letters to elected officials, poll results, or other political expressions. In this model, good newspapers provide adequate, reliable information in a clear and transparent fashion, good readers receive the information and process it rationally, and then they become good voters who express preferences informed by the news and responsive to justifiable values. This particular version of the so-called transmission model makes sense as well to many in the media, and to a certain extent it makes sense to us.

 

There is much, however, that the transmission model fails to capture. As James Carey (1988) has pointed out, it fails to capture the ritual functions of the media - the way news helps communities form and sustain themselves. It also fails to capture the dense overlapping network of relationships that forms the medium.

 

Any medium constitutes a complicated network of relationships. A medium is, after all, something "in between," something that mediates among  and connects other things. A newspaper connects sources of news with readers; it brings them into or facilitates particular relationships.  A simple transmission model of news imagines a unidirectional circuit - the world makes news, the newspaper carries it, the public consumes it.  But each way station along the route stands for something much more complicated. The world that makes the news is actually a disparate collection of institutional and non-institutional sources: the police, governments and their agencies, stock markets, sports associations, entertainment industries, polling organizations, the wire services, and so forth. The newspaper too is a collection of disparate actors: reporters and editors and all sorts of production personnel, from printers to paper boys, of course, but also lawyers and accountants and marketing experts. The public always has been segmented by age, gender, race, class, income, religion, and the like (although newspapers have only recently become more inclined to think of their audience as a group of disparate markets). So, just thinking within a transmission model, a newspaper sets up a very complicated, multidimensional set of relationships.  The Boston Globe simultaneously maintains relationships between the Red Sox and their fans, between the high-tech industries along Route 128 and their investors, City Hall and voters, and Shaw's supermarkets and people who buy groceries. In a material sense, the newspaper itself is the combination of all these relationships (see Nerone, 1994). But news is not just about material relationships.

 

There is another order of relationships constituting a newspaper, which we call represented relationships. These are the ways that the newspaper imagines and proposes that it mediates in the world.  Often these are expressed in truisms: The press is the eyes and ears of the people, or, The press is the restless adversary of corruption, or, The press is the palladium of liberty.  In formulations like these, the press proposes that it relates to the citizenry as a champion, and to powerful public and private institutions as a watchdog.  Obviously, this represented order of relationships works to explain and justify the material relationships that also constitute the newspaper. 

 

Such representations crystallize in the form of the newspaper.  By form we mean the persisting visible structure of the newspaper, the things that make the New York Times, for example, visible as the same newspaper day after day although its contents change. Form includes the things that are traditionally labeled layout and design and typography; it also includes habits of illustration, genres of reportage, and schemes of departmentalization. Form is everything a newspaper does to present the look of the news.

 

Any media form includes a proposed or normative model of the medium itself. Put another way, the form includes the way the medium imagines itself to be and to act. In its physical arrangement, structure, and format, a newspaper reiterates an ideal for itself.

 

This ideal is not a description of the material work of the newspaper.  The form proposes ideal relationships between the world and the public, for instance, that will not correspond exactly to the material relationships it actually sets up. The newspaper will figure its reader as citizen on one level and as consumer on another, as self-controlled rational investor on one level and as emotional buyer or fan on another, and so on. The relationship between material and represented relationships in any medium tells a lot about the work that the form does in the world. It is not accidental that we phrase this relationship in a way that echoes Althusser's famous definition of ideology as representing "the imagined relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (1969, p. 162). Our analysis of form will often read like an ideological critique. One premise of our critique is that form embodies the imagined relationship of a medium to its society and polity.

 

We hope that approaching the newspaper through its formal dimension will offer a new perspective on a familiar subject.  The newspaper is perhaps the oldest and best understood mass medium, and has been the subject of many histories and scholarly treatments. Content analyses have looked at all sorts of news matter, examining images as well as words. Audience studies have not only measured trends and demographics but also explored the act of reading, tracking of eye movements of readers, analyzing depictions of readers in the fine and graphic arts, doing ethnographies of practices among actual and historical readers. Structural research on the newspaper industry has revealed changing patterns of ownership and competition and probed shifting professional standards. All of these research traditions share a concern with the political consequences of news, and the rapidly growing field of political draws on all of them to explore the relationship between news and the agendas of public institutions.

 

The many studies illuminate one or more aspects of the newspaper without necessarily combining to reveal the larger whole. They tend to understand the newspaper as a fairly simple transmission channel, bracketing many of the material relationships the newspaper constitutes, and slighting the order of represented relationships. We think that formal analysis offers a promising framework for considering the whole newspaper. The form of the newspaper, encompassing words as well as images, gives a physical existence to the full range of imagined relations that scholars have described piecemeal.

 

Newspaper forms have a complicated history. In the United States alone, tens of thousands of newspapers have been published.  Obviously we could not give an account that includes all the varieties of newspaper form.  Instead, we hewed to the mainstream, looking for the most typical or hegemonic way of putting together a general interest newspaper at any given time.  Surprisingly, this story has not previously been told-sadly, too, because we are naturally happier critiquing a mainstream narrative for its exclusions. Instead of arguing for more complexity, here we have aimed for simplicity and elegance, trying to balance faithfulness to detail (all the noise of real history) with the clarity about the form of news as a whole that our account requires.

 

With those caveats, we have constructed a narrative based on a series of different newspaper formations: printerly, partisan, Victorian, and modern. Each formation combined a look with a system of newspaper production (or type) and a broader cultural configuration. The printerly newspaper combined a bookish appearance with craft production and the republican values of the Revolution, including a fantasy about the public sphere. The partisan newspaper used a larger format and more elaborate division of labor, with editors as chief operating officers, and was integrated into the rise of mass politics and the market economy. The crowded potpourri of Victorian newspapers emerged as publishers directed a news industry generating printed products for a newly imperial nation. And the modern, streamlined newspaper combined bureaucratic production with expert explanation in an era of monopoly capitalism.

 

 

 

 

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