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5.1: Introduction

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    Phil Meyer began his 1991 book, “The New Precision Journalism,” an updated version of his seminal work introducing reporters to social science methods, with an observation that seems even more prescient today: “If you are a journalist, or thinking of becoming one, you may have already noticed this: They are raising the ante on what it takes to be a journalist.” 1

    While the ante is being raised, resources seem to be evaporating. Decreasing circulation and advertising revenues are leading management to ask more and more from their reporting and editing staffs. How do you deliver more? Embrace technology and use the power of the people to help with your reporting legwork. It makes newsgathering much more efficient if you can jumpstart the process of finding background, data, sources and experts.

    To meet the increasing demands of editors, reporters need to become as efficient as possible. Through the use of technology and a more open approach to gathering information, reporters, photographers and editors can leverage their talent for newsgathering and news judgment without sacrificing their values. Capturing keystrokes to build useful databases (calendars, births, deaths, scores) and using new reporting methods such as crowdsourcing and distributed reporting are becoming the focus for more and more U.S. newsrooms.

    Journalists are generally suspicious of new reporting methods. OK, this is actually one of the slowest professions to embrace change. A few decades ago, reporters were unsure about using quotes in a news story that came over the telephone, that newfangled gadget. In the 1990s, the same reservations surfaced when reporters began using e-mail. Today, despite the advances being made on news Web sites, there remains a general disdain for the new medium by many “traditional” journalists and a longing for the good old days before a fragmented media landscape made the job of capturing the audience’s attention so demanding.

    ... if you cut through the rhetoric you’ll find unprecedented opportunities to do better journalism by embracing technology.

    Today, everything from blogs to reader comments on a news Web site are sparking debate and causing traditionalists to sound many warnings. But if you cut through the rhetoric you’ll find unprecedented opportunities to do better journalism by embracing technology and transparency — two essential qualities for amplifying the important work of journalism in the digital age.

    References

    1. Philip Meyer, The New Precision Journalism, 2nd Ed., Indiana University Press, 1991. Philip Meyer is the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is an updated version of Meyer's 1973 book, “Precision Journalism: A Reporter's Introduction to Social Science Methods.”

    This page titled 5.1: Introduction is shared under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Mark Briggs via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.