It’s time for the second edition of the Nieman Journalism Lab Book Club, in which we collectively read a book (new or old) that can tell us something about where journalism is headed. You may remember the first go-round, back in November, when we read Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing. We did an extended interview with Jeff and had journalists write capsule reviews or responses to parts of the book.

Throughout February, we’ll be reading James Hamilton’s All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News. Jay is a professor of political science and economics at Duke University and director of its DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy.

What I like best about Jay’s book is that he’s not a journalist. Don’t get me wrong: Journalists are going to have to do most of the heavy lifting to make whatever comes next work. But we also have trouble seeing beyond our own professional codes sometimes. There are established ways for journalists to think about their profession, and it’s open to question whether the codes that made sense in times of plenty are automatically the ones that make sense in times of crisis. Jay’s goal is the creation of more hard news, and he’s using the tools of economics to try to figure out how to make that happen.

Just as with our last Book Club, we’ll have top-notch journalists writing about each chapter of Jay’s book. And, also like last time, I’ve done an extended video interview with Jay that I’ll be posting in bits and pieces throughout the month. Jay may also be able to take your questions about the book and his findings at some point during the month.

So go get your hands on All the News That’s Fit to Sell, and we’ll get started with the reading next Monday. I’ll add links to each part of our coverage here once they’re posted.

Reviews:
— Chapter 1: How responsive to economic stimuli are journalists?
— Chapter 2: How technology built objectivity into newspapers
— Chapter 3: Media bias is based on profit motive
— Chapter 4: How language and audience align on the nightly news
— Chapters 5 and 6: The system’s to blame for the loss of hard news
— Chapter 7: A look back at the early days of online news
— Chapter 8: Talking Heads ‘99

Interview with Jay:
— Chapter 1: Meet Jay Hamilton
— Chapter 2: Why rational ignorance keeps people from reading your amazing story
— Chapters 3 and 4: How economic incentives shape the news
— Chapter 5: The secret tie between Playboy and food stamps
— Chapter 6: The role of prestige and personality in selling the news
— Chapter 7: Some online lessons from the (fairly) recent past

[Here's Zach's review of Chapter 1 of this month's Nieman Journalism Lab Book Club selection. For more info, check here. —Ed.]

Economists aren’t afraid to ask questions like, “Would the First Amendment pass a cost-benefit test?” Worse, they are willing to claim that the answer isn’t obvious.

But infuriating as they may be, economists are often a necessary foil to conventional wisdom, ingrained assumptions, and institutions that have too long relied on rigid dogma. That’s why we’re reading All the News That’s Fit to Sell, by James T. Hamilton, an economist and political scientist at Duke, who poses that question about our Constitution’s most important sentence toward the end of his first chapter. He’s approaching the news business from a perspective that would be considered heretical in most newsrooms. If you asked a reporter — or, worse, an editor — what factors affect coverage in her newsroom, she might rattle off the trusty who, what, where, when, and why. Hamilton agrees that five W’s determine what does and doesn’t become news, but he says they are:

1. Who cares about a particular piece of information?

2. What are they willing to pay to find it, or what are others willing to pay to reach them?

3. Where can media outlets or advertisers reach these people?

4. When is it profitable to provide the information?

5. Why is this profitable?

Keep reading »

Here’s the first (six-minute) segment of my video interview with James Hamilton, the author of this month’s Book Club selection, All the News That’s Fit to Sell. We cover some basic introductions and the contents of Chapter 1. Some of the ideas he covers:

— “If you think that this is a problem, that there is too little information provided about government — and I offer some economic explanations for why there’s too little — what tools could economics provide you with?”

— “Economists view professions as something that have evolved in response to market failures. If there are situations where people have different amounts of information — teachers have more information than students, doctors than patients, journalists than readers, in some sense, at an individual level.”

And, after the jump, a complete transcript. Keep reading »

[Here's Zach's review of Chapter 2 of this month's Nieman Journalism Lab Book Club selection. For more info, check here. —Ed.]

The New York Sun was one of the first non-partisan newspapers in the United States, and it might have been the country’s last partisan newspaper as well. What happened in the intervening 175 years was the full-circle transformation of American publishing.

To be clear, there have been two New York Suns: one that printed from 1833 until 1950, reigning for a time as the most important daily in New York, and another, unrelated except by name and motto, that published between 2002 and 2008. The original Sun’s founder, Benjamin Day, credited his newspaper’s success in the middle of the 20th century to a new invention, the rotary press, which upended the model of printing that had reigned since Gutenberg. “The development of presses with runs of 25,000 sheets or more per hour meant a single newspaper could supply a significant portion of a city’s readers,” writes James Hamilton in chapter two of All the News That’s Fit to Sell. The increased output, along with a decline in the cost of paper, meant that publishers like Day didn’t need to rely on expensive subscriptions like typical American newspapers of the time. Instead, he charged a penny.

Keep reading »

This is the second portion of my interview with Jay Hamilton, author of this month’s Nieman Journalism Lab Book Club selection, All the News That’s Fit to Sell. We’re talking about Chapter 2, which is where the meat of the book begins. Jay uses the transition from party-affiliated to independent newspapers in the late 19th century as a way to look at how economic factors influence what many journalists would like to think are independent decisions of craft. A few points we discuss:

— Why it makes economic sense for so many people to ignore the news;
— What the Internet has in common with the mid-19th century;
— The role of fixed costs in a news organization’s distribution strategies.

Full transcript after the jump. Keep reading »

[Here's Martin's review of Chapter 3 of this month's Nieman Journalism Lab Book Club selection. For more info, check here. —Ed.]

James Hamilton begins Chapter 3 of All the News that’s Fit to Sell with a question that frames a long-standing debate within and surrounding the media industry: “Do the media provide people with the information they want or the information they need?”

When I started out in the newspaper business in the late 1970s, there were still plenty of old-school editors around — the Lou Grant types whose only tone of voice was gruff, who typed with two fingers, and who (one imagined) still had a hat with a press pass stuck in the brim and a bottle of whiskey in the bottom desk drawer. They were schooled in objective journalism and in the newspaper as an institution providing a great public service, resented references to the paper as as a “product,” would throw us advertising hacks out of the newsroom if we suggested or requested any small editorial favor for our customers, and firmly believed that indeed, their job was to give people news they needed, with “need” defined by them, the almighty editors. They would have no use for surveys to find out what people “wanted”; they made only a few concessions to perceived wants, such as tolerating in the paper non-hard-news features like comics and the “women’s pages.”

But the television news market was never like this — from TV’s earliest days, it was clear that most programs were tailored for specific slices of the viewing audience.  The varying demographics of those audience slices differed in value to advertisers, who were willing to pay premium ad rates (expressed as “cost per thousand” or CPM) for a more valuable audience mix — one more responsive to their particular messages.  Eventually, this evolved into the highly sophisticated slicing and dicing of an audience that’s now spread across a multiplicity of channels.

Keep reading »

[Here's Martin's review of Chapter 4 of this month's Nieman Journalism Lab Book Club selection. For more info, check here. —Ed.]

In Chapter 4 of All the News That’s Fit to Sell, James Hamilton tackles information programs on network television ranging from 60 Minutes, Dateline, 20/20 and the nightly news shows all the way down to non-fiction entertainment shows like World’s Most Amazing Videos, World’s Sexiest Commercials, and When Good Pets Go Bad (some of which appear to have been sweeps-period one-offs, not series).

In an analytical tour the force (made possible, one assumes, by a generous alotment of research assistants), he gathered transcripts of a week’s worth of these shows, carved the text up into 1,010 500-word segments, ran all of these through a software program called DICTION, which was designed to analyze the language of politics — all in order to derive for each program linguistic profile measurements in DICTION’s 33 categories, which fall into five overarching silos: certainty, optimism, activity, realism and commonality.  This analysis demonstrated that there were statistically significant differences between the various programs, not surprisingly.  For example, the evening news shows scored highest in activity terms, and in subcategories like numerical terms and collective terms that refer to groups and organizations.  Morning news shows and news magazines scored much higher on human interest terms and self-references.

Keep reading »

Here’s the next installment of my interview with James Hamilton, author of this month’s Nieman Journalism Lab Book Club selection, All the News That’s Fit to Sell. Here we talk about Chapters 3 and 4, which use TV as a jumping-off point to discuss how economic incentives encourage certain kinds of news coverage and discourage others. Among the topics we cover:

— How FCC deregulation led to more liberal subject matter on the evening news;
— How old Bill O’Reilly’s viewers are (hint: really old);
— How family-owned newspapers encouraged more public-service journalism; and
— How NPR encourages you to “consume an image of yourself.”

As always, there’s a full transcript below the jump. Keep reading »

[For Chapters 5 and 6 of this month's Nieman Journalism Lab Book Club selection, we turn to Lisa Williams of Placeblogger fame. For more info on the Book Club, check here. —Ed.]

Who’s to blame for the scourge of soft news: men, women, or the system?

The list of people, trends, and things responsible for the death of hard news is so long that it would take the entire cast of CSI a week to process them — women who want celebrity fluff; tuned-out young folk who are stuck on Facebook and text messaging; the moneyed few who manage the industry; Congress; Craig Newmark; the Internet; TiVo. But the leading suspect? Women.

James Hamilton’s discussion of local news in All The News That’s Fit To Sell opens with a commonplace — if a local station is trying to appeal to women, they’ll feature soft news.

That’s right, it’s all our fault.

Keep reading »

Here’s the next installment of my interview with James Hamilton, author of this month’s Nieman Journalism Lab Book Club selection, All the News That’s Fit to Sell. Our topic here is Chapter 5, which focuses on, among other things, how market forces influence local TV news. Some of the topics we cover:

— How the format of local TV news forces news directors into certain kinds of stories;
— Why you never saw coverage of your local anti-Iraq War protests on TV;
— Why journalism sometimes requires going against market tastes; and
— Whether we’ll rely on a single online hub for our information in the future.

As always, there’s a full transcript below the jump. Keep reading »

We’re up to Chapter 6 in our video interview with Duke economist James Hamilton. He’s the author of this month’s Nieman Journalism Lab Book Club selection, All the News That’s Fit to Sell. In this chapter, Jay talks about the role prestige and personality play in how media is produced and consumed. Among the topics:

— The psychic return of owning a big-city newspaper;
— Why a journalists’ brand matters more in a fractured-media age; and
— How the Duke men’s basketball team qualifies as an economist’s “excludable good.”

As always, there’s a full transcript below the jump. Keep reading »

[For Chapters 7 and 8 of this month's Nieman Journalism Lab Book Club selection, we turn to Tim Windsor. For more info on the Book Club, check here. —Ed.]

Chapter 7 of All the News That’s Fit to Sell, like much of the book that surrounds it, is a moment frozen in time, like Pompeii or Colonial Williamsburg. Published in 2004, using data gathered in 2000, it’s a slice of history.

But what can we learn from this detailed look into the past? Let’s jump into The Wayback Machine, crank up some ‘N Sync on your CD Walkman and let’s take a look at the state of Online News, circa 2000.

Keep reading »

Here’s the newest part of my interview with Jay Hamilton, author of this month’s Nieman Journalism Lab book club selection, All the News That’s Fit to Sell. Here we’re talking about Chapter 7, which focuses on what we can learn from the economics of online news around 2000. Our topics include:

— How the power-law graph explains Internet distribution patterns;
— The importance of audience scale for Internet advertising; and
— Why Google ads for “stocking stuffer” have replaced George W. Bush belt-buckles.

As always, there’s a full transcript below. Keep reading »

[For Chapters 7 and 8 of this month's Nieman Journalism Lab Book Club selection, we turn to Tim Windsor. For more info on the Book Club, check here. —Ed.]

While the previous chapter’s data about the early days of online news do not age well, the focus of Chapter 8 — the value of celebrity among television anchors in 1999 and the likelihood that a political pundit will speak in shorthand and soundbites on television — hold up better.

In short, Chapter 8 is all about how television news personalities — whether anchors or pundits — became high-priced and marketable commodities, and how at least some of them streamlined their act (dumbed it down, Hamilton implies) for the small screen.

Among the evidence cited: Keep reading »

We’re nearing the end of our month-long Nieman Journalism Lab Book Club (which has seeped into March). Here’s my discussion with Jay Hamilton, author of All the News That’s Fit to Sell, about Chapter 8. It’s one of the most interesting chapters in the book, dealing with “journalists as goods.” Among the topics we discuss:

— Why poverty stories might generate more audience sympathy if they had fewer poor people in them;
— Why George Will is a different animal in print than on cable;
— How journalists’ self-conception might change over time; and
— What Joseph Stalin and Marshall McLuhan have to do with all this.

As always, there’s a full transcript below. Keep reading »