Showing posts with label newspapers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label newspapers. Show all posts

February 10 - All the News That's Fit to Print Day

Posted on February 10, 2018

This is an important time for media, news, journalism, reporters, and newspapers...for several reasons:

(1) In a trend that began in the mid-1900s, more and more people got news from "free" sources such as radio and television, rather than from subscription sources such as newspapers. Revenues for these sources depends on ads - and to some extent, news organizations in those media had to be more careful about not angering powerful people and corporations. 

(2) In a trend that began in the mid-1990s, people have been getting more and more news from the internet, social media, and digital versions of traditional news sources.

(3) The result of this is that fewer and fewer people felt compelled to subscribe to or pay for news sources such as newspapers - why pay when we can get news for free? - and that meant that fewer reporters and journalists were paid to get important information and investigate possible wrong-doing.



(4) Another result of digitization of news is that it takes little money to create quite professional looking/sounding blogs, websites, and podcasts, so many many many people could share their ideas - a good thing! unless it's really propaganda! - and spread information - a good thing! unless it's really MISinformation!




And the result of that is that we now live in a world in which many of our friends, neighbors, and relatives don't even agree on basic facts about politics, economies, governments, or world events. How many times have you heard that Russians deliberately spread propaganda during the 2016 election? How many times have you heard the accusation of "Fake news!"

Still...

Let's not forget that, even before radio and TV and the internet, there was misinformation, there were "news" organizations that tried so hard to grab eyeballs that they acted more like entertainment, there was propaganda, there were appeals to emotion, there was sensationalism.

"Yellow journalism" is what folks in the U.S. used to call newspapers that used eye-catching headlines that aren't backed by well-researched, fact-based news from reliable sources. Newspapers that dabbled in yellow journalism would exaggerate stories to create more fear, more excitement, more sadness. They would spend time and effort digging up sex scandals and other "juicy" stories rather than covering the sorts of scandals that were less interesting but probably way more important - like government officials ripping off people.



"Tabloid newspapers" is a term used in the both the U.S. and the U.K. Some tabloids don't bother to come even close to actual news - their pages are full of faked photos and fiction pretending to be fact, like "Hillary Clinton Adopts Alien Baby" or "Dead Rock Stars Return on Ghost Planet." (My two examples are actual tabloid headlines - but absolutely incorrect!)





A man named Adolph Ochs began to use the slogan
All the news that's fit to print" very soon after he gained a controlling interest in The New York Times, in August of 1896. 

Many people think that this slogan way oversteps. It seems to claim that there is no news worth reading other than what appears on its pages. 

However, Ochs was trying to distance his newspaper from the sensationalism of yellow press or tabloids. He was trying to point out that the Times was more reliable, more fact-based, more accurate, than many other newspapers.

"All passengers saved" was the sort of baseless
claim made by many newspapers immediately
after the Titanic disaster. Obviously, lots of people
(around 1,500) died, and this sort of incorrect
headline was cruel to the families of the dead.

I read that The New York Times was one of the
newspapers that had correct information only
in its Titanic coverage, even from the very
beginning.
In October of 1896, the Times started a contest. Readers were offered a $100 prize for a slogan that represented the Times' reliability even more than the phrase "All the news that's fit to print." Readers came up with a lot of suggestions - and one, judged by newspaper execs, did win the promised prize - but it ended up that the Times didn't ditch the "All the news" slogan in favor of the contest winner.

I guess the publishers, editors, and (I assume) Ochs didn't like even the best suggestion as well as Ochs's slogan.

And that's why, ever since this date in 1897, "All the news that's fit to print" has appeared on the front page (upper left corner) of the Times.


Here are a few of the suggestions:

All the News That Decent People Want

Full of Meat, Clean and Neat

All That's New, True, and Clever

All the News to Instruct and Amuse

The top three finalists that didn't win:

Always Decent; Never Dull

The News of the Day; Not the Rubbish

A Decent Newspaper for Decent People

And the winner:

All the World's News, but Not a School for Scandal

I think I would like the slogan presented with the words "our goal": 

Our goal: 
All the news that's fit to print.

Here's a few other slogans:

The Week Magazine: All you need to know about 
everything that matters


The slogan "ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING
THAT MATTERS" can be seen in teeny tiny print at the bottom
left of the magazine!

New Statesman: Expand your mind; change your world

The Daily Mercury in Mackay, Australia: News you can use

O Globo in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: You read, you know

National Post in Canada: The news. You have our word on it.



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March 16 – Black Press Day

Posted on March 16, 2016


 On this date in 1827, editors John Brown Russwurm and Reverend Samuel Cornish published the first issue of Freedom's Journal. This is considered by the National Newspaper Publishers Association to be the first black newspaper in the United States; to commemorate the date, NNPA has declared today to be Black Press Day.

Russwurm and Cornish wrote in their famous first editorial, “We wish to plead our own cause. For too long have others spoken for us.”

The North Star, founded by Frederick Douglass, was another important early entry in African American journalism. As you can imagine, Freedom's Journal and The North Star were published in the north. Many copies were handed out in secret in the South. I picture enslaved people secretly teaching one another to read using these newspapers, or gathering around the literate ones among them to get news.


Freedom's Journal was founded by Peter Williams, Jr., and several other free black men who lived in New York City. They carefully chose Russwurm and Cornish, who were already community activists, to be the editors. The goals for the newspaper included opposing New York papers that attacked African American people and encouraged slavery – even though slavery was gradually becoming illegal in New York, the state's economy had strong ties to the South, because its textile mills processed cotton grown in the South. Largely with labor of enslaved people.

Another goal was to oppose articles in the abolitionist press. Of course, abolitionists wanted to abolish all slavery – so that's a good thing – but a lot of white journalists writing for the abolitionist press still described black people as being simpler, more childlike and dependent, and inferior to white people.

Black press is more than newspapers.
Black newspapers were an important source of information during times of slavery, times of Civil War, times of Jim Crow laws, and times of the Civil Rights Movement...and the black press is still an important source of information now!

Even though many of us talk about the death of newspapers in the age of the internet, Ourvillagenews.com has been established to help people find African American newspapers throughout the U.S. and to provide links to these newspapers' websites and social media sites – all in one place. 

The Black Press Research Collective offers some lesson plans to teach about Freedom's Journal and the importance of black voices in journalism. 

Watch the PBS film Soldiers Without Swords. 




Also on this date:












































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April 7 – International Snailpapers Day

Posted on April 7, 2015

What are snailpapers?

I'm pretty sure you are picturing some sort of sticky papers you put out around your strawberry plants, to protect the fruit YOU want to eat from snails...right?


But “snailpapers” are just newspapers – a way of getting news the old fashioned way.

The sllllloooooowww way. People get their news from newspapers around 12 hours late, according to the former newspaperman and current blogger who created this special day.

Hence, snailpapers. (Just like the phrase “snail mail.”)

News gets to us faster through radio, television, twitter, phone alerts, and the internet than it possibly could through newspapers. Journalists have to phone or otherwise wire in their stories to the newspaper, and then the paper has to edit the story, set the type, print and assemble the newspaper, and then distribute it (a step that, in fact, usually entails multiple steps before the newspaper is in the hands of the reader).

Whereas with the phone alert, twitter, and internet, that first step - someone phoning/wiring the story – can be the ONLY step!



So...why would anybody choose slow?

First, there are not really easy ways to find out some categories of local news, in some communities, other than the local paper. If you want to get up on Saturday morning, for example, and check the scores of the Friday-night football games from all three of your town's high schools, the local paper is often the best bet.

And if you want more than the box scores of local sporting events – articles describing the high points of the game, photos – again, the town newspaper might be the easiest source.

Second, some people love the tactile experience of paging through a newspaper over breakfast and coffee or tea.

Third, some sorts of news stories don't have to be reported in a split-second fashion. They might be carefully investigated reports that were fact checked by two people other than the writers; after journalists create such a story over the course of days, weeks, or even months, putting them out in newspapers or magazines is as valid as putting them out on the internet.

But, of course, if newspapers and magazines cannot afford to continue as printed-paper artifacts, because of plummeting subscriptions and drastically reduced advertising, then their online forms will eventually be the only forms.


For now, today, there still ARE printed newspapers – so go out and buy one in order to celebrate Snailpapers Day!

  • Find out the high-tech way that newspapers are printed these days by watching this video. 

  • See if your family has saved any old newspaper clippings. Maybe one of your parents has a scrapbook of his or her childhood competitions...or someone has save big-time headlines such as the attack on Pearl Harbor or 9-11.
  • Find out how you can access old newspaper articles here. They might come in handy while doing research on a historical event or on your own family tree. Or you can just browse around and compare different newspaper's coverage of important events. 


Also on this date:


International Beaver Day












Motherhood and Beauty Day in Armenia









Plan ahead:

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And here are my Pinterest boards for:

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