Thank you, Mohsen, for reviving discussion in this thread. So you are suggesting that readers provide private financial support for the Press to keep it out of the hands of big business. Any solution would help, because the Press, given its present state, does not provide us the news we need to know. Let me give a concrete example: there is trouble at present between the Palestinians and the Israelis, a continued bombing campaign. I have been finding out through bits and pieces of multiple news stories, but nothing complete or accurate. Also, we know nothing of the war Saudi Arabia and one of its allies (Oman?) is waging against Iraq. Why no news? Because the war is irrelevant to big business. News about what is going on inside Syria is too sparse. I could go on and on with examples. The Press is pathetic.

A stupid question: can't it be to some extent just the effect of our perception? I mean that now the Internet makes it possible for an ordinary reader to check the facts in the articles quite quickly and easily, often from several independent sources, and hence we perhaps become more critical of the work of journalists? On the other hand, of course, this effect does not rule out the degradation of the journalism standards per se.

How many ordinary readers actually check out the facts from several independent sources? Let´s be realistic.

Actually, both points are true. Unfortunately, in the cut and thrustnof high speed journalism now, I think that editors take more shortcuts than they used to and journalism suffers. The prepackaged bite is becoming the main sorce of information for certain types of journalism and deep research is unprofitable. Add to that the rise of opinion pieces as news. That being said, there is still good journalism. It is more rare and so people become used to the lesser quality articles by mass action. And society slowly transitions away from the quality. Nett result has been a redefinition of the professional journalist to be more like those working for the English Daily Mirror, which is so sensationalist because it sells. It is a capitalism/social problem that won't change unless demands change.

@Nelson: Sorry, you are right. Such a check by a reader would probably happen only exceptionally.

Artur, thank you, you are a gentleman, and I wish you a Happy New Year.

Mark, note how newcasts reduce items to soundbites. No sentences-- mere fragments. The listener must finish thoughts on his own. As to content, sports events edge out political happenings. Along with sports, celebrities´ doings occupy front pages. Yes, sensationalism sells, and how can we find out what is happening in the front lines of Afghanistan? If there is good journalism, I´d like to know where to find it. Perhaps you could cite some examples for orientation.

This is a complex issue. One major reason for journalistic quality going down might be bias towards certain views as a result of monetary and financial pressure. Media sources are vulnerable because they depend on advertising which opens the door for corporations to influence them. Also, at the end of the day a newspaper/TV channel/radio station must be profitable, so creating a news piece must only take so long (which also makes fact-checking difficult).

The internet also plays a role because it provides news for free while people still need to get paid for creating them. And also, my impression is the general public doesn't believe those with the best arguments but those who are shouting loudest.

We are not aware of the importance of a healthy media landscape which scrutinizes what's going on in the world.

I agree, journalism is degenerating, and I'd be curious how this can be objectively measured?

Toni, thanks for your valuable contribution to a very significant concern. An objective way to measure degeneration in newscasting is to take an edition of the evening news and to count and time the commercials, then compare the time wasted to the time actually devoted to the news. This, of course, would provide merely a crude, quantitative measure. But a more qualitative measure would involve analyzing each news item to see whether it contains who, what, when, where, and why. You would be surprised to note how much is increasingly missing.

Speaking of commercialism and newscasting, have you noted the prevalence of pharmaceutical commercials? What does the thriving drug industry derive from the degradation of the daily news broadcasts?

I think it's also important to define what makes a news item "valuable" or "important" in the first place. Is it global politics like the conflict in the middle east, even though Secretary Kerry didn't reach any new agreements, or is it Michael Schumacher's skiing accident (or Angela Merkel's)? It seems difficult to develop objective criteria without leaving things out. The when, where, what... are definitely important to distinguish real news from boulevard press gossip and potential product placements.

I've noticed the large numbers of pharma ads, but I only live in the US since one and a half years ago, so I can't put this amount in perspective. I honestly don't know what they derive from the degradation of daily news broadcasting, apart from that it might be easier to control particular news outlets to their advantage.

Tony, I think that as a newcomer to the United States, you would enjoy a less biased perspective than I, a U.S. native and long-time resident with relatively short though frequent trips abroad. Yes, those anecdotes about athletes are not genuine news, whereas Kerry´s negotiations for lifting sanctions in exchange for annihilation of weapons of mass destruction could have had an impact on millions of Iranians. There you have an objective criterion: how many people are affected by a piece of news? The degeneration of journalism in this country diminishes American freedom of the Press and freedom of information.

Some things you only start to appreciate once you learn they're finite. German print media doesn't have as many health-related ads (anything from medication to weight-loss to fitness). However, in terms of transparency and non-bias I would say German news aren't much better.

The impact of a story might be a way to go. Also, whether brands and trademarks are used only used to help understand the story or whether the story is rather an advertisement disguised as information (a so-called informercial, which is a very worrying development). But then again, where to draw the line?

Yes, infomercials are the scourge of the airways, plain evidence of journalistic decadence, in my opinion. It´s been so long that I´ve been to Germany, that I can´t tell you about the quality of its journalism. I will say this, and I don´t know if you´d agree: the decline in journalism may be a function of the decline in education. I remember being shocked that some excellent German-born students met by me recently had never heard of Immanuel Kant! On the other hand, students from Germany belonging to my generation had all read Kant.

I worked as a newspaper writer and photographer for about 5 years, and I quit because of the increasingly low wages for freelancer, because of things like the internet and the fact that fewer people read the paper.

My guess is that as a result of our increasingly faster lifestyle short newsbites (postable on Facebook and Twitter) are more popular than longer, more complex stories which require more time and attention to read and more time and effort to research and put together. I notice myself that I don't have as much time to read the paper, and longer stories have to be really interesting (which politics usually isn't I have to admit) for me to read it.

Disguised ads (informercials) are a bad thing, but I wouldn't blame anyone specific. In the end it's a societal problem I think. Journalism is less seen as the watchdog of what is happening in the world.

By the way, thanks for this discussion. I really appreciate it!

It´s so refreshing to a have a bias-free, international perspective from someone like you who has actually worked as a journalist and can account for the decline of the profession from the inside! Who is to blame for disguised ads? Madison Avenue, the commercial world. Who else? Greed overrides all concerns about informing the public.

Most newspaper articles or even articles in scientific journals are trumped up or have facts totally misaligned with the truth; most are ultimately useless.

Articles in scientific journals? Do you have some particular ones in mind that you could specify generically without naming names?

While waiting for Michael to respond-- and I hope he does--, I´d like to put the question I posed in the title: How to restore journalism to classical standards? If newspapers are going under, is it worthwhile to expend the effort and capital to bring them back?

There is a graduel confusing of news with entertaining. What is a news? something important that everybody should know! Or , something that most people would enjoy to know, important or trivial?

The web offers news for free and nearly in real-time, so why pay for something that's already outdated when it gets published? Some large, high-quality newspapers in Germany though still make profit and actually gain readers, like "Die Welt", "Die Zeit", and I think "Die Süddeutsche" as well. Mostly rural, smaller papers are going down though.

Personally, I like public-service broadcasting like NPR and PBS (or the German equivalent Deutschlandradio and ARD/ZDF, to name the biggest) because they have less gossip, their programs are of better quality than private media, and they have no ads. In Germany though they're funded through a fee from the public regulated by law which many people don't like because they're forced to pay whether they listen to it or not.

I think to restore journalism to classical standards it needs proper financial support, either through donations (like NPR/PBS, right?), a set fee (like in Germany), or advertisement (which by the way could work, too, just look at organizations like TED).

I would like to propose a lateral perspective, the argument was very used during the first yrs of the 2000s, now has a bit disappeared from the analysis.

That is the growing impact of blogging and now micro-blogging attitude on journalism.

The attitude of individual journalists to be even bloggers or become, above all, a blogger /microblogger before being a journalist.

The choice of newspapers / journalistic heads / news agencies to depute much of its information in the bloggers-side of their framework — decreasing the journalistic staff inside the agency kernel.

The grammar of journalism is as always very structured.

There is a Journalistic Ethics, and it runs from the individual practitioner to its editor in chief, ahed towards the editorial line of the entire journalistic head.

Obviously, I'm not saying that this ethical structure had ever guaranteed results of perfect honesty, balance and quality of information. But I say that if we speak of degeneration we are finding quite a break of **this** traditional structure.

I do not believe that such a breakage or alteration is to be founded along the line that involves advertising.

Novelties in the chain journalism:advertising, at least in Europe, yet seem to follow the rules of traditional grammars — both in the two disciplines. And, as some of the results are questionable, it is still possible to identify both the criteria used by authors, and the reasons that lead to a form of communication rather than to another [including financial reasons].

Where you find a true degeneracy, ie an "ungrammatical" way to introduce new unpredictable praxis, it is precisely when in the information-kernels entered a large number of outsiders items. Precisely bloggers.

Are we confident that, as some say, being a blogger and a journalist is equally attributable to a single dynamic, ie "making news"? Are bloggers and columnists the same thing? If instead of a frame of [authoritative] reviewers and editorialists, who know better than all the grammars of journalism, we use dozens of bloggers - this for a dozen years, or two dozens - are we sure not to determine the loss of alphabet of' making information? Is it not true that, in that period of losing some assodate grammars, the entire shape of the information framework will be changed? Could it “degenerate”, also for this?

I give to your attention a 2006 paper about this kind of relation: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.91.4357&rep=rep1&type=pdf

[There are many others on the same subject, of course].

g

Louis, I think I understand what you're after, but "news" can mean both things (from Latin "nova" = "something that is new", ergo both "something everybody should know" and "something only certain people would enjoy to know"). But how do you differentiate what they "should" and "should not" know?

Maybe a criterion is how well something is tied to economics, politics, how many people are affected, and/or what consequences it has on multilateral relationships (tieing back to politics and economics). This way you might be able to distinguish between John Kerry going to the middle east vs. Justin Bieber buying a new pair of sneakers.

Toni,

As a former journalist disaffected with journalism, do you have any advice for other journalists who want to leave their profession? Where can they turn as an alternative?

Oh, please don't treat me as an expert here. I don't know the panacea or the best practice for this.

Friends of mine went into PR because of better wages. Of course that also takes away your independence, and it's a 180 turn in terms of work philosophy. People should ask themselfes what they really want and whether or not changing professions can actually get them there. Surely every profession has its downsides (first of which is if you don't like what you're doing regardless of what you get paid).

I went from journalism to science also because I wanted to dig deeper into topics and not only scratch the surface for a day or two, and then move on to the next story. This is what I do know, and I love it, even though I have a lot more work and things are much more complex.

Afterall I think it's very valuable to know how things are working in the journalism world, what journalists want and what makes a scientific topic interesting for the media (and what doesn't).

Nobody knows the cure-all for what is ailing journalism, but you have seen the bad with the good. Perhaps it is characteristic of journalism to touch surfaces, and this is an adventure for some, but a shortcoming for others who, right now like you, have mentally matured. Thanks for sharing your experiences.

You're very welcome. I'm enjoying this discussion a lot. I don't often think about this so often.

Maybe journalism is like the peer-reviewing for current topics. Afterall, its methods overlap a lot with science: you do research, do interviews, study data, compare it to existing facts, and then boil it down to a concise publication. Also, I suppose after a while you might settle into a certain topic (e.g. theater, sports, business, politics, science) and jump around less. Also much like science, right?

Toni,

The decision on what they "should" and "should not" know is based on honest judgement. The problem is the meddling between entertainment calls under the pressure to increase readerchip or viewership. When I listen to the ctv evening news, nothing is worst than a news about prince Harry. What on earth this idiot has to do with important information about the world that I expect to find in the news cast.

Louis, you are right. The same holds true for those ridiculous professional athletes, who outside their playing fields behave as if they were still on it. They are not newsworthy.

Louis, I think about those useless crowned heads in Europe. What purpose do these figureheads serve other than to collect their salaries? True, the heads of State-- Queen Elizabeth II of U.K., King Juan Carlos I of Spain -- serve a symbolic function. But their family members have nothing to do for a whole lifetime but to entertain their subjects through their most insignificant actions. At best, they can, like the late Princess Diana, perform memorable acts of charity, and then these deeds deserve journalistic publicity as an example for other royals to follow. At worst, they engage in shady practices like certain members of Juan Carlos´ family and cheat the State. These thefts also are newsworthy as examples for royals NOT to follow.

Nelson,

I am not against specialized information programs where people could watch what the celebrities are doing in their personal life. There already a lot of this shows. Those interested could watch them. What I wish is to watch a news cast that would concentrate on what is judged by a group of highly professional journalisms, to be very important for us to know.

What a fine idea! Someone-- perhaps it was Toni Klemm-- mentioned newspapers still surviving in the U.S. and Germany which maintain the standards of newsworthiness. News about celebrities belong in "People"´s magazine; news about athletes, in "Sports Illustrated."

I have always wondered if wire services are at all to blame for the degeneration of world journalism. After all, all news stations and newspapers broadcast and publish the same mix of daily happenings and non-happenings.

You have to look at the question from both ways. The main stream media lost its habit of feeding us pabulum the day Walter Cronkite changed his mind on Vietnam- on air- in the 60s; therefore, it depends on what you mean by "classical journalism." heaven forbid we should ever go back to the days of that kind of news.

Today you have a diverse journalism, which is a very good thing, because the main stream corporate media's focus is politics and breaking news, with a little bit of human interest here and there, and a lot of celebrity news, but they leave a lot out.

Their reporting on science and in particular the environment is not good. They verify nothing and are often used by Corporate PR people to tell the story their way.

The new citizen journalist and professional freelance bloggers are filling the void and making a difference.

For example: the website Fukushimaupdate.com featured a citizen journalist video of the writer walking toward a San Francisco beach with a Geiger counter, showing it rising frightfully in December; it went viral and got the state authorities on the beach with their equipment and got the main stream media reporting it.

But the main stream media did not ask the State authorities to get see their Geiger counters, nor did they buy their own to show the public it was OK The media nor the State have accused the citizen journalist of falsifying data either.

My bet is that a lot of average Joe's will be buying their own Geiger counters to check out the beach in the future. The citizen journalist hit the state secrecy issue of the head.

Andrea, thanks so much for offering the "other" side of the coin, the view that traditional journalism had its limits too. Yes, I personally am sensitive at present to the omissions of news. During the two Middle East wars in which the US was until recently engaged-- now we are only semi-engaged in one--, news coverage was at best skimpy. I had one son who served both in Iraq and in Afghanistan. So naturally I wanted to be informed.

Right now I wonder what your opinion is of the coverage of the Snowden story. Day by day I grow "curiouser and curiouser," as Alice said, to find out what other relevant tidbits Snowden may have uncovered, apart from government conservation of telephone calls by private citizens with no relationship to national security. Somebody is possibly withholding something, and it´s likely not Snowden himself.

I'm a dual citizen, But as we say in America :We're the land of the free because of the brave.

Mr.. Snowden compared himself and his release of information to Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers.

There is not an apt comparison in that analogy.

Ellsberg did not flee the country; he went to trial and was acquitted.

I think if you buck the system as a function of your own personal,moral choice, it's fine, but you must have the courage of your own convictions.

Now we have duelling judges that will take the issue to the Supreme Court over some corporate issues, but without the personal narrative of Mr. Snowden before us, it becomes a lackluster story that will probably not get its due.

Snowdon was standing up for individual privacy; we needed an individual to stand trial, not a corporation that went to court as a defense measure, to validate its actions.

What is keeping Snowden from becoming another Ellsberg? Fear of reprisal in 21st-century corporate America? Additional information in his possession that could rock the system to its foundations? I suppose we´ll never know, at least not by reading the newspaper.

Welcome, so happy with this fruitful discussion, and I think that the press has deviated completely from its primary function to be a medium for news and public awareness, especially in developing countries where dictator governments and capital, so I think that one of the first steps in order to return the press to its mission should be separated editorial policy away from the owner and the capital to be popular press depends on all audience members in the financial support.

Thank you, Mohsen, for reviving discussion in this thread. So you are suggesting that readers provide private financial support for the Press to keep it out of the hands of big business. Any solution would help, because the Press, given its present state, does not provide us the news we need to know. Let me give a concrete example: there is trouble at present between the Palestinians and the Israelis, a continued bombing campaign. I have been finding out through bits and pieces of multiple news stories, but nothing complete or accurate. Also, we know nothing of the war Saudi Arabia and one of its allies (Oman?) is waging against Iraq. Why no news? Because the war is irrelevant to big business. News about what is going on inside Syria is too sparse. I could go on and on with examples. The Press is pathetic.

many thanks for your words prof. and i am so happy to read and discuss an important topic a bout journalism, and i hope that i have said useful words in this discussion.

i think that journalism faces many obstacles:

1) News agencies which owned by certain countries and its control on the flow of news.

2) Control of the capital and advertisers on the media.

3) Tendency of the journalism itself to the excitement is a big reason makes it deviate from the balanced coverage because newspapers is still dealing with the news out of "When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news." And this makes newspapers omit many of news just because it is ordinary from the point of view of journalists, and it is, of course, biased viewpoint.

So, I think that journalism needs to determine what is newsworthy far from John B. Bogart (1848–1921) news definition.

Dear Mohsen,

If you want to determine who owns the news, look at the sponsors of newcasts. Nightly news at 7 P.M. are overwhelmingly sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. Many late news programs around 11 P.M. have automobile sponsors. You are quite correct to hint that if you look at the news from the viewpoints of big capital, you can easily explain which stories are aired on those programs. Your remarks are extremely helpful, to put it mildly.

Hello Nelson,

I've read through some of the other posts and you have clearly opened a lively discussion on a multifaceted issue. Some of the previous posts mention sponsorship, alluding to the bigger issues at play. The conditions which journalists are working under, and the corporate media monopolies who they are working for is the primary source of the problems you identify. I've heard many journalists, the majority of whom are from Canada, speak and write about the lack of journalistic independence and autonomy that they are afforded. They are not the ones deciding whose stories are told and in what fashion. Unfortunately, as you are aware, aside from smaller presses/online media sites, mainstream/dominant media is also corporate media. Profit is their motivation, not democratic ideals such as freedom of the press. This robs us all of our rights and poses an ongoing threat to the health of our democracies.

Automomy of journalist is one thing but if there is a journalist star system where the star journalist make a lot of money, these star journalist will not naturally be concerned with the rise of the price of food in supermarket, or the number of homeless, or the stuation of the lower income families.

Angela, you have made a good point, with concrete evidence to support your contention about journalistic sponsorship.

Louis, you raise a new point about star journalists slanting their reporting away from the concerns of the masses. This is valuable.

There is a third point I need to raise: journalism is becoming ever riskier. Note the recent killing of Western reporters in Afghanistan. The increasing danger of such war zones makes reporting about them almost impossible.

The 24 hour news cycle puts the decadence of journalism into a nutshell. Thanks, Alicia. That makes everything clear!

A very interesting discussion! @ Nelson, thanx for this question and @ Alicia, nicely put! 24 hrs news keep us updated with the world wide happenings but then the credibility or reliability is going down, as you pointed out due to various factors like financial backers, fierce competition, being the first in breaking news, to be precise, etc etc

Any suggestions for improving future journalism, Jaya and Alicia?

Journalism in the United States is becoming too corporate. Stories are more then often intended to be a ploy to drive up sales and readers for paper as oppose to reporting the truth.

Future of journalism can be bettered by inducing high moral standard. Media can make or break, so it has to be driven by high moral ethics and how to do that, is a question today. As Cecilia pointed out, it has to be taught right from the beginning .

Last night, the University of Connecticut women´s basketball team was scheduled to play the University of Kentucky´s female basketball team for the national college championship. A pep rally for the U. of Connecticut´s team replaced all the news on NBC, CBS, and ABC broadcasting networks. I find this kind of programming irresponsible. Athletics is not the only news of interest for everyone tuning in. What about the rest of the world? It was simply excluded!