American journalism is in dire straits. Is a robust public subsidy the antidote?
no! I say
his past summer, John Oliver laid out a now-familiar narrative of journalism’s decline. He decried profit-hungry billionaires like Sam Zell, who have sent big papers into bankruptcy; lamented shrinking advertising revenues; and used a Spotlight satire to criticize clickbait.
He ended with a popular conclusion about the crisis in journalism:
The truth is, a big part of the blame for this industry’s dire straights is on us and our unwillingness to pay for the work journalists produce. The longer we get something for free, the more unwilling we are to pay for it. We are all going to have to pay for journalism or we are going to pay for it.
Certainly, the outcry against fake news in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory lends credence to Oliver’s remarks. But what if his formulation is still wrong? Maybe the problem isn’t individuals declining to pay for news but instead a deeper, structural failing. Maybe, like other universal goods — public education, libraries, roads, post offices — we should all pay for it, collectively. Maybe, in short, journalism should be subsidized.
At the moment, newsrooms use a variety of stopgap measures — new funding models, private philanthropy, the latest business scheme — to try to buy themselves time. Meanwhile, media concentration gallops along, billionaires continue to exercise undue influence over the news, and increasingly desperate ploys for advertising dollars fail to stanch the flow of hemorrhaging jobs.
A public subsidy that supports in-depth journalism and serves the public, not shareholders and advertisers, might be the only way to solve the journalism crisis.
When Billionaires Rule
Last summer, the New York Times documented the nightmares of privately operated public services. After emergency services were outsourced to a private company, one woman in Tennessee died as an EMT smoked a cigarette because her company couldn’t get a crew together fast enough; paramedics in New York stole supplies from hospitals because their parent company couldn’t afford them; a man in the South was billed $15,000 after his house burned down because the privatized fire department didn’t arrive. At first glance, the article — entitled “When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers” — seemed like a powerful piece of investigative journalism that defended public investment.
But, as blogger Yves Smith pointed out at the time, “despite presenting a litany of horror stories, [the article] never made a case for the fundamental unsuitability of private equity for this type of activity.”
The discourse around journalism’s collapse suffers from a similar problem. Profit seeking distorts the public function that journalists, like first responders, are supposed to perform. Yet too often, finger-wagging at individual billionaires stands in for a systemic critique of the media concentration and profit-making that empowers them.
In 1983, when fifty companies owned the majority of media outlets, Ben Bagdikian warned that monopolistic ownership would smother democracy and impair the public’s understanding of the world.
Today, at the same time local newspapers shut down and cut costs, the combination of increasingly concentrated ownership and for-profit technological innovation has convinced a new generation of billionaires to buy up media outlets and launch new media enterprises.
Some have become the personification of avarice and confused priorities. They purchase a newspaper, gloating about their investment in the public interest, and then offer their newsroom a big shrug as they slash jobs to increase profit margins. Others are philanthropists who support adversarial public interest journalism or inject much-needed cash into shrinking newsrooms.
Yet the problem isn’t the character of individual billionaires per se, but the fact that the political system has allowed such power to accumulate in the first place.
While it matters on some level whether these billionaire-owned or privately funded outlets churn out self-interested coverage (as Sheldon Adelson wants his Las Vegas Review-Journal to do) or critical reporting (as Pierre Omidyar justifiably sees his First Look Media as doing), a journalism dependent on the whims of the wealthy is not a media system worthy of a democracy.
The Advertising Implosion
Most everyone agrees that the advertising-based revenue model for news media has imploded. Where people differ is the effect of that implosion.
Some pundits complain about the contemporary media’s shallowness and sensationalism, casting “disruptive” technologies as the enemy of old-fashioned reporting. Others praise social media — often dubbed “participatory media” — as “democratic” and “open.”
Tom Rosenstiel is firmly in camp two. A future-of-journalism talking head, he praises the shift from the “trust me” Gutenberg era to the “show me” digital age. “What has disrupted us will now begin to save us; the audience will now determine the future of news,” he enthuses.
Since newspaper revenue remains in free fall — classified ads have dropped by 75 percent, and regular ad revenue has plummeted by 40 percent — Rosenstiel argues that consumers have more power than ever. When consumers select the news outlets they prefer — whether they’re old standards or upstarts — advertisers flock to those sites, leaving less popular outlets without revenue.
When Rosenstiel acknowledges the severity of the traditional media’s revenue problem, he offers a standard Silicon Valley prescription: embrace innovation and try new business models. “The thing formerly known as advertising will become tools to help us shop, compare, save,” he argues. The tracking and surveillance used to personalize ads aren’t invasive threats to privacy, but the saving grace for otherwise outmoded news organizations.
Yet this approach has shown itself entirely unable to generate the revenue needed to sustain quality journalism. Many news organizations, like the New York Times, have bulked up their advertising and “digital dissemination” and have still been forced to cut reporters.
It takes lots of resources to produce hard-hitting investigative work. In addition to travel expenses, journalists need to have the time to hit wall after wall, follow leads to dead ends, and generally devote months on end to a single investigative project.
Recently, Mother Jones sent reporter Shane Bauer undercover as a guard to tell the story of life inside a private prison. In an appeal for reader support, the editor and publisher “conservatively” estimated the bill for the thirty-five-thousand-word feature: “counting just the biggest chunks of staff time that went into it, [it cost] roughly $350,000. The banner ads that appeared on the article brought in $5,000, give or take.”
For all of the hype about technology transforming society, the journalism that’s changed society tended to be produced by fiscally sustainable outlets that could afford to take risks. In the digital age, outlets are scrambling or forgoing that work all together.
If traditional journalism is cratering, can social media sites like Facebook fill in the gap? Recent events suggest we should be skeptical.
Last July, Mark Zuckerberg commented on Philando Castile’s death at the hands of police in Minnesota. His post expressed condolences for Castile’s family and hope for a future free of such tragedies, before praising Facebook Live — the platform on which Diamond Reynolds, Castile’s fiancée, streamed the shooting — as evidence that Facebook enables people to “com[e] together to build a more open and connected world.”
A month later, Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram shut down accounts belonging to Korryn Gaines, a Maryland woman shot and killed by police, at the request of the authorities. The following month, The Intercept reported that Facebook is “collaborating with the Israeli Government to determine what should be censored,” actively suppressing the voices of Palestinians and others fighting Israeli occupation.
Whether Facebook sides with the powerful or the powerless — opening windows to democracy or actively shutting them — is up to a company whose raison d’être is profit-making, not disseminating news.
And what a profitable company it’s become. Mark Zuckerberg now ranks as the sixth richest person in the world, worth approximately $44.6 billion. His wealth, of course, comes from the 1.7 billion users who post, click, share, and update, a phenomenon that critics have dubbed “digital sharecropping” or “digital feudalism.”
Simultaneously, thousands of journalists have lost their jobs and newsrooms have been downsized or shuttered, creating a yawning gap between the rich propagators of “digital sharecropping” and reporters, the people who are actually supposed to be the eyes and ears of a democratic information system.
Journalism of the Past
For all the talk of journalism’s bleak future, we don’t hear a lot about its past.
But as Astra Taylor points out in The People’s Platform, the fact that American newspapers leeched off advertising’s fat for a hundred years or so was a lucky break, not some kind of natural law.
The fact is, a mass market for serious reporting has never actually existed; in the United States readers have never paid anywhere near the actual price of news production. Instead, newspapers, by bundling the crossword puzzle and the real estate classified with the metro section and stories about world events, assembled a mass audience that could be sold to advertisers, who provided, on average, about 80 percent of revenue.
Before they came to rely on advertising revenue, newspapers were supported by public subsidies. Robert McChesney and John Nichols chronicle this history in The Death and Life of American Journalism:
While there were rollicking disagreements about the character and content of the post-colonial press in America, the one universally accepted premise was that the government needed to heavily subsidize the creation and development of the press if the constitutional system were to succeed. . . . The idea that Americans should roll the dice and hope rich people would find it profitable to produce the journalism required for a constitutional republic to succeed was simply unimaginable in the days when America was conceived and formed.
Everyone agreed that the government should support a free press because, as communications scholar Timothy E. Cook suggests, the “wide circulation of news throughout the colonies” helped make the “American Revolution possible.”
Early American governments expanded and improved many public institutions that we still rely on today, most notably roads and the postal system. In the 1790s alone, the total mileage of “post roads” increased from 1,875 to 21,000. Over the next few decades, the number of post offices also expanded rapidly.
While the post office did facilitate government and commercial activities, its primary role was transporting newspapers. As McChesney and Nichols recount, the “crucial debate in the Congress of 1792 was at what rate newspapers should be charged to be sent through the mail. All parties agreed that Congress should permit newspapers to be mailed at a price well below actual cost — to be subsidized.”
Between 1792 and 1845, newspapers accounted for as much as 95 percent of the mail and only 15 percent of the postal service’s revenue. “The state nurtured a free-press system the free-market showed little interest in providing; and it did so because, without state intervention on behalf of the public’s right to know, constitutional rule, not to mention self-government, could not succeed,” McChesney and Nichols write.
By the end of the nineteenth century, postal subsidies had effectively ended and advertisers had flocked to newspapers, rendering the old subsidized model obsolete and creating new conflicts between commercial and public interests. These tensions persisted for the next several decades.
Advertisers wanted favorable coverage for their products (and often to advance their own political agenda). Through the Progressive era, McChesney and Nichols note, “writers like Will Irwin and Upton Sinclair deplor[ed] the antidemocratic nature of the advertising-supported, semi-monopolistic press system.”
After World War II, one solution to the problem took hold: the professionalization of journalism. Espoused by the New York Times and virtually every other mainstream outlet, this model demanded that newspapers enforce certain standards of objectivity, sourcing, and fact-checking, and, most importantly, erect a wall between news outlets’ advertising and editorial departments.
The professionalization of journalism — the postwar consensus — also had enormous drawbacks. It pushed the press, and arguably the country, toward the center as journalists prioritized getting “both sides of the story,” trumpeting their neutrality while excluding radical voices. (It continues to prop up lousy journalism that is “fact checked,” “professional,” or “objective.”) But this arrangement pleased advertisers, and the media landscape continued to consolidate.
The dominance of the postwar consensus obscured its fragility. Two things held the whole thing together: the anti-commercialism of newspapers and journalists (who saw the division between reporting and selling as sacrosanct) and the heterogeneity of the media system. Even with increasing concentration, newspapers remained abundant. If a paper lost the public’s trust, readers could pick up another one. It kept newspapers in check.
But with substantially fewer newspapers than a generation ago, and vanishingly few alternative revenue options, new outlets are racing to include advertisers in editorial content. Native advertising — in which advertising masquerades as editorial content “supported by Microsoft” or “in partnership with Toyota” — has become the most prominent of these revenue-generating techniques.
Every newspaper — from the local alt-weekly to the Wall Street Journal — has embraced it. The New York Times has a website devoted to wooing advertisers where it touts its ability to create “brand content and experiences that shape opinion.”
The consequences are more dire than fewer papers and journalists. Last year, The Intercept reported that, during the DNC and RNC conventions, the Hill was selling $200,000 editorial interviews with up to three “industry executives or organizational representatives of your choice.”
Our democracy can’t afford this future of journalism.
A Free Press Isn’t Free
American citizens pay less than $1.50 each for public media. In comparison, Brits spend about $80, and Finns and Danes spend about $100. Anyone who’s read the British tabloids knows the country is no paragon of journalistic excellence. But, as Nichols and McChesney argue, a subsidized Fourth Estate has at least helped foster a healthier democracy, less government corruption, higher civic participation, and a much higher — and more diverse — proportion of the population reading the news.
In the US, because we don’t adequately subsidize public media, PBS and NPR must take corporate advertising (“underwriting”) in order to fill the gap. NPR gets a mere 5 percent of its budget from the local, state, and federal governments, yet receives as much as 19 percent from corporations and another 8 percent from foundations. (Last time I turned on NPR, I learned the show I was listening to was “supported by” Koch Industries.)
While a genuinely public outlet would improve the US media landscape, another, complementary, approach would be to introduce what McChesney and Nichols call a “Citizen News Voucher.” When filing their taxes, citizens could elect to subsidize an independent news outlet of their choice. News outlets would have to maintain a minimum number of subsidizers and would be subject to various restrictions, like forgoing advertising.
By leaving it to citizens to choose the outlets they prefer, the news voucher would empower readers, instead of the state, to decide how the Fourth Estate is funded. It would also buttress independent journalists — not just those who are mouthpieces of the state. As for revenue, taxes on advertising, consumer electronics, or commercial media’s use of public infrastructure (like airwaves) could be used to fund such a program.
These proposals aren’t meant to be definitive, but instead to spark a discussion about public funding that — despite numerous studies from the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, and the advocacy group Free Press — seems virtually nonexistent. Before we can decide on the specifics, we must first acknowledge that the American press is in dire straits and, if we want a vibrant democracy, needs to be subsidized.
Then we’ll have a long road ahead. McChesney told me he thinks Croatia or Scotland will fund a public press before the United States. Our best bet, he argues, is introducing programs at the local or state level.
A robust subsidy for news media will become politically possible when it’s taken up as part of a larger set of reforms designed to win democratic rule: expanding voting rights, funding free higher education, introducing self-government into the workplace.
The Sanders campaign and other popular movements have demonstrated that reforms like these are not only possible, but quite popular. As Trump prepares to enter the White House and resistance movements take shape, the fight for a more democratic media system, long sidelined, must move to the center.
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James Agee: a journalist, critic, poet, screenwriter and novelist who wrote the text for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a celebration of depression-era sharecropper families.
Christiane Amanpour: long-time and distinguished international reporter for CNN; now also works for ABC News.
Hannah Arendt: a political thinker, author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, who reported the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker; those articles were turned into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in 1963.
Russell Baker: a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and humorist who wrote the popular “Observer” column in the New York Times from 1962 to 1998.
James Baldwin:
an essayist, journalist and novelist whose finely written essays,
including “Notes of a Native Son,” “Nobody Knows My Name” and The Fire Next Time, made a significant contribution to the civil-rights movement.
Donald L. Barlett:
an investigative journalist who, along with his colleague James B.
Steele, won two Pulitzer Prizes and multiple other awards for his
powerful investigative series from the 1970s through the 1990s at the Philadelphia Inquirer and later at Time magazine.
Meyer Berger: a fine columnist and feature writer for the New York Times, where he worked, except for a short stretch at the New Yorker, from 1928 to 1959; Berger won the Pulitzer Prize for his report on the murderer Howard Unruh.
Carl Bernstein: while a young reporter at the Washington Post in the early 1970s broke the Watergate scandal along with Bob Woodward.
Herbert Block (Herblock): a clever and creative Washington editorial cartoonist who coined the term ‘McCarthyism’ and worked for the Washington Post for 55 years, until his death in 2001.
Margaret Bourke-White: a photographer who was among the first women to report on wars and whose pictures appeared on the cover of Life magazine, beginning in 1936.
Ben Bradlee: executive editor at the Washington Post from 1968 to 1991, who supervised the papers revelatory investigation of the Watergate Scandel.
Ed Bradley: a reporter who covered the Vietnam War, the 1976 presidential race, and the White House at CBS and who was a correspondent on 60 Minutes for 26 years.
Jimmy Breslin:
street-wise, storytelling, Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York City
columnist for the city’s tabloids over many decades in the second half
of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
David Brinkley: co-anchor of the top-rated Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC from 1956 to 1970, which he followed by a distinguished career as an anchor and commentator at NBC and ABC News.
David Broder: influential Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter and columnist, who joined the Washington Post in 1968.
Tom Brokaw: anchored NBC’s Nightly News and the network’s special-events coverage, including elections and September 11, from 1982 to 2004.
Art Buchwald: a Pulitzer Prize-winning satirist whose humor column, which began in the International Herald Tribune in 1949, was eventually syndicated to more than 550 newspapers.
William F. Buckley, Jr.: editor, columnist, author, and TV host who founded the National Review in 1955.
Robert Capa:
a photographer who documented major historic events including the D-Day
landings and the Spanish Civil War; Capa became an American citizen in
1946.
Truman Capote: a novelist whose exhaustively reported and lyrically written 1965 “nonfiction novel,” In Cold Blood, was one of the most respected works of “new journalism.”
Rachel Carson: a science writer whose 1962 book Silent Spring called attention to the dangers of pesticides and helped inspire the environmental movement.
Howard Cosell: an aggressive, even abrasive, sports broadcaster, Cosell was one of the first Monday Night Football
announcers in 1970 and was on the show until 1983; he was known for his
unvarnished commentary and sympathetic reporting on Muhammad Ali.
Walter Cronkite:
a reporter who became the best known and perhaps most respected
American television journalist of his time as the anchor of the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981.
Joan Didion:
a literary journalist, novelist and memoirist, who helped invent “new
journalism” in the 1960s and whose judgmental but superbly written
articles have become standard texts in many journalism departments.
W.E.B. Du Bois: a sociologist, civil rights activist, editor, and journalist who is best-known for his collection of articles, The Souls of Black Folk, and for his columns on race during his tenure as editor of The Crisis, 1910–1934.
Barbara Ehrenreich: a journalist and political activist who authored 21 books, including Nickel and Dimed, published in 2001, an expose of the living and working conditions of the working poor.
Nora Ephron: a columnist, humorist, screenwriter and director, who wrote clever and incisive social and cultural commentary for Esquire and other publications beginning in the 1960s.
Walker Evans: a photographer who reported Let Us Now Praise Famous Men along with James Agee and earned acclaim for documenting of the faces of the Great Depression.
Clay Felker: with Milton Glaser in 1968 launched New York magazine, which he had edited when it was a supplement to the Herald Tribune, and helped invent what became the most widely imitated style of magazine journalism in the late twentieth century and beyond.
Dexter Filkins: a wartime reporter and author who writes for the New Yorker, Filkins won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 along with several other New York Times journalists for reports from Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Frances FitzGerald:
a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who went to Saigon in 1966 and in
1972, published one of the most influential critiques of the war, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.
Thomas Friedman:
a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, columnist and author, Friedman began
writing his column on foreign affairs, economics and the environment
for the New York Times in 1995.
Fred Friendly:
president of CBS News in the mid-1960s and the co-creator of the
television program “See It Now”; produced an investigation of Sen.
Joseph McCarthy and the renowned 1960 documentary “Harvest of Shame.”
Martha Gellhorn: a World War II correspondent whose articles were collected in The Face of War; she also covered the Vietnam War and the Six Day War in the Middle East.
Philip Gourevitch: a staff writer for the New Yorker, reported on the Rwanda genocide in his 1998 book We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.
Katharine Graham: a publisher who took over the Washington Post
after her husband’s suicide in 1963, she resisted White House pressure
during the paper’s printing of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate
investigation; her memoir won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998.
Linda Greenhouse: a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who covered the US Supreme Court for the New York Times for more than 25 years, beginning in 1978.
David Halberstam:
a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, known for his coverage
of Vietnam, the civil rights movement, politics, and sports.
Pete Hamill: reporter, columnist, editor, memoirist and novelist who, beginning with a job as a reporter at the New York Post in 1960, reported, edited or wrote for most of New York City’s newspapers and many magazines.
Richard Harding Davis:
journalist and fiction writer, whose powerfully written reports on
major events, such as the Spanish-American War and the First World War,
made him one of the best-known journalists of his time.
Ernest Hemingway:
a Nobel-Prize-winning novelist and journalist, who reported on Europe
during war and peace for a variety of North American publications.
Nat Hentoff: who with his Village Voice column, which began in 1957, crusaded, even against some liberal orthodoxies, for civil liberties.
Bob Herbert: who wrote a column for the New York Times from 1993 to 2011 that dealt with poverty, racism, the Iraq War, and politics.
Michael Herr: who covered the Vietnam War with unprecedented rawness and cynicism for Esquire and wrote the book Dispatches, a partially fictionalized account of his experiences in Vietnam.
John Hersey:
a journalist and novelist whose thoroughly reported and tightly written
account of the consequences of the atomic bomb America dropped on
Hiroshima filled an entire issue of the New Yorker in 1946 and became one of the most read books in America in the second half of the twentieth century.
Seymour Hersh:
a long-time investigative reporter, specializing is national security
issues, who earned acclaim for his Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of
the massacre by American soldiers at My Lai in Vietnam in 1968, as well
as his 2004 reports about American mistreatment of detainees at Abu
Ghraib.
Don Hewitt:
a television news producer who helped invent the evening news on CBS,
produced the first televised presidential debate in 1960, extended the CBS Evening News from 15 to 30 minutes in 1963, and later introduced and served as the long-time executive producer of 60 Minutes.
Christopher Hitchens:
a prolific journalist with a large vocabulary and no fear of
controversy, who wrote many widely discussed books and wrote columns for
the Nation and Vanity Fair.
Langston Hughes: a poet and playwright, Hughes also wrote a weekly column for the Chicago Defender from 1942 to 1962.
Peter Jennings: a long-time ABC television reporter, he anchored World News Tonight from 1983 until his death in 2005.
Murray Kempton:
a Pulitizer-Prize-winning journalist whose long, stately sentences and
short tolerance for pretense made him one of New York’s most revered
columnists and reporters; he wrote for the New York Post, the New York Review of Books, and, beginning in 1981, for Newsday.
Ted Koppel: a television reporter and anchor who started a late-night news show in 1979 that eventually became Nightline.
Jane Kramer: a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1964, writing mostly from Europe.
Charles Kuralt: Kuralt reported “On the Road” features for the CBS Evening News beginning in 1967 and later anchored CBS News Sunday Morning.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc: author of Random Family, the acclaimed non-fiction book published in 2002 about the relations of drug dealers in the South Bronx.
Anthony Lewis: a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a columnist for the New York Times from 1969 to 2001.
A. J. Liebling: a New Yorker correspondent beginning in 1935 and an early press critic whose article collections include the acclaimed The Road Back to Paris and The Wayward Pressman.
Walter Lippmann: an intellectual, journalist and writer who was one of the founding editors of the New Republic magazine in 1914 and a long-time newspaper columnist.
J. Anthony Lukas: a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, best known for his book on school integration in Boston: Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families.
Jane Mayer: an investigative reporter who has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1968; her 2008 book The Dark Side exposed the Bush administration’s more questionable tactics in the war on terror.
Mary McCarthy: a novelist and critic, McCarthy’s essays appeared in publications like the Partisan Review, the Nation, the New Republic, Harper’s, and the New York Review of Books from the 1940s through the 1970s
John McPhee: a staff writer for the New Yorker
since 1965, his detailed, discursive portraits – often explaining some
aspect of the earth or its inhabitants – helped expand the range of
journalism.
H. L. Mencken:
a tough, judgmental, impeccably literate and hugely influential
journalist, cultural critic, essayist, satirist and editor, he reported
on the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial.
Joseph Mitchell: a staff writer for the New Yorker from 1938 until his death in 1996, who won acclaim for his off-beat profiles, collected in the book Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories.
Bill Moyers:
an award-winning public-broadcasting journalist since 1971 and former
White House press secretary under Lyndon Johnson, who also worked as the
publisher of Newsday and senior analyst for the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.
Edward R. Murrow:
an influential television and radio journalist who covered the bombing
of London, the liberation of Buchenwald, and helped expose Sen. Joseph
McCarthy and, in the 1960 documentary “Harvest of Shame,” the plight of
American farm workers.
Adolph Ochs: the New York Times,
when he purchased it in 1896, had a circulation of about 9,000; by 1921
Ochs’ paper, increasingly known for its nonpartisan reporting, had a
staff of 1,885 and a circulation of 780,000.
Gordon Parks: an activist, writer, and photojournalist, Parks became the first African-American photographer for Life in 1948.
George Polk:
a journalist and radio broadcaster for CBS who insisted on finding his
own information, Polk was killed while covering the Greek Civil War in
1948; his colleagues established an award in his name.
Gabe Pressman:
a senior correspondent at WNBC-TV, he helped pioneer local television
journalism and has been a New York City reporter for over 60 years.
Ernie Pyle:
renowned wartime journalist whose folksy, poetic, GI-centered reports
from Europe and the Pacific during World War II earned him the 1944
Pulitzer Prize; Pyle was killed while covering the end of the war.
Anna Quindlen: a novelist, journalist and columnist, her path-breaking New York Times column “Public and Private,” won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992.
Dan Rather:
a journalist who covered the Kennedy assassination and the Nixon White
House for CBS and was the longest serving anchor of an American network
newscast, the CBS Evening News, from 1981 to 2005.
David Remnick: Remnick, a former Washington Post reporter, won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire and in 1998 became the editor of the New Yorker, for which he also writes and reports.
A. M. Rosenthal: a Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter, then the commanding executive editor of the New York Times from 1977 to 1986 – a period of growth and transition; later a columnist.
Carl Rowan: the first nationally syndicated African-American columnist; he wrote his column, based at the Chicago Sun-Times, from 1966 to 1998.
Mike Royko:
a Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago columnist since the early 1960s and
author of an unauthorized biography of Mayor Richard J. Daley, Boss.
Marlene Sanders:
the first female television correspondent in Vietnam, the first female
anchor on a US network television evening newscast and the first female
vice president of ABC News.
William Shawn: an editor who worked at the New Yorker
for 53 years and ran it for 35 years, beginning in 1952; he is given
much of the credit for establishing the magazine’s tradition of
excellence in long-form journalism.
Neil Sheehan: covered Vietnam for UPI, obtained the Pentagon Papers in 1971 for the New York Times from Daniel Ellsberg and won the Pulitzer Prize for his book examining the failure of US policy in Vietnam: A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.
Randy Shilts: one of the first openly gay mainstream journalists; devoted himself to covering the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s for the San Francisco Chronicle; his book examining that epidemic, And the Band Played On, was published in 1987; Shilts died of AIDS at the age of 42 in 1994.
William Shirer: a wartime correspondent and radio broadcaster who wrote Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1939–1941.
Susan Sontag:
an essayist, novelist and preeminent intellectual, among her many
influential writings was “Notes on ‘Camp,’” published in 1964; a
human-rights activist, she wrote about the plight of Bosnia for the Nation in 1995 and even moved to Sarajevo to call further attention to that plight.
James B. Steele:
an investigative journalist who, along with his colleague Donald L.
Bartlett, won two Pulitzer Prizes and multiple other awards for his
investigative series from the 1970s through the 1990s at the Philadelphia Inquirer and later at Time magazine.
Lincoln Steffens: while Shame of the Cities
was published, in book form, in 1904 – more than 100 years ago –
Steffens career as an influential journalist certainly continued, and
included an interview with Lenin after the revolution and reporting from
Mussolini’s Italy.
John Steinbeck: a Nobel-Prize-winning novelist and journalist who exposed the hardships of Okie migrant camp life in the San Francisco News in 1936, covered World War II and wrote newspaper columns in the 1950s.
Gloria Steinem: a social activist and writer, Steinem co-founded the women’s magazine Ms. in 1972.
I. F. Stone: an investigative journalist who published his own newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekly, from 1953 to 1967.
Gay Talese: a literary journalist; author of the renowned 1966 Esquire profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” and of many thoroughly reported, gracefully written books.
Dorothy Thompson:
her reporting on Hitler and the rise of Nazism led to her being
expelled from Germany in 1934; also a widely syndicated newspaper
columnist, a rare female voice in radio news in the 1930s and the
“second most influential woman in America,” after Eleanor Roosevelt,
according to Time magazine in 1939.
Hunter S. Thompson:
created the uninhibited, self-parodying ‘gonzo’ style of journalism in
the 1960s and 1970s, covered the 1972 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone, and wrote the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Garry Trudeau: the creator of the Doonesbury cartoon, in 1975 he became the first person to win a Pulitzer Prize for a comic strip.
Barbara Walters: a journalist, known for her interviewing skills, and host of many influential ABC programs, including the ABC Evening News and 20/20.
“Weegee”: the pseudonym of Arthur Fellig a prominent photojournalist who focused on New York’s Lower East Side in the 1930s and 1940s.
Ida B. Wells:
prominent civil rights activist whose 1892 editorial on the lynching of
three black men earned her popularity; she wrote her autobiography Crusade for Justice in 1928.
E. B. White: the author of the popular children’s books Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, and the co-author of The Elements of Style, White contributed to the New Yorker for about six decades, beginning in 1925.
Theodore White: a political journalist and historian who pioneered behind-the-scenes campaign reporting in his book The Making of the President: 1960, the first of many in the series.
Walter Winchell: a powerful and widely read newspaper gossip columnist who also had the top-rated radio show in 1948.
Tom Wolfe:
a popular journalist and novelist who helped invent “new journalism” in
the 1960s and 1970s with his well reported and kinetically written
articles and books, including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Right Stuff.
Bob Woodward: a reporter and editor at the Washington Post
whose investigative articles with Carl Bernstein’s helped break the
Watergate scandal in the early 1970s; Woodward went on to write a series
of book detailing the inner workings of Washington.