WORDSPEAK
Changing forms of news
BY ANAND
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The unstructured narrative style of today's blogs actually hark back to the news reporting of the 1960s.
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unlike diurnal's circuitous journey to "journal", the word "press" has retained its original spelling and meaning.
LAST month's column with its explanation of "citizen journalism" was sent in just before the Mumbai tragedy. Since then, nearly every television news channel in India has begun to ask "citizen journalists" to send in photos and video clips of any event they might have witnessed. Although grainy and fuzzy, the images provide a sense of immediacy that makes up for poor quality. As telephone cameras and other recoding devices are likely to become more sophisticated and affordable, we are certain to see greater number of reports by "citizen journalists" in the years to come.
Original meaning
The words "journalism/journalists" and "press" (the gathering and publishing of news in the form of newspapers or magazines — the collective term for both the people and the newspapers) are not only synonymous; these are often used interchangeably. But unlike diurnal's circuitous journey to "journal", the word "press" has retained its original spelling and meaning. As a noun and a verb, press has so many different meanings as to warrant a separate column, but since this column is about journalism, lets focus on the definition of press as "machine pressing images onto paper: a machine that presses inked set type or etched plates onto paper.
"[In the] specific sense `machine for printing' is from 1535; extended to publishing houses by 1579 and to publishing generally (in phrases like `freedom of the press') c.1680. This gradually shifted c.1800-1820 to `periodical publishing, journalism'. Meaning `journalists collectively' was recorded in 1926. Press agent in 1883; the first press conference was held in 1937. Press secretary is recorded from 1959." Members of the electronic media working through satellite feeds and with cutting edge technology do not seem to mind being shoved into the `press gallery' that refers to a 500-year-old technique of churning out news.
The term "new journalism" might be anachronistic for some, in view of blogs and Internet journalism, but the trend for free-wheeling, unstructured narrative style typical of the blogs began in the 1960s, and was responsible, in more than one way, for breaking down the conventions of news reporting and writing. It was the time of anti-Vietnam War protest, hippies and the psychedelic movement, of political turmoil.
Borrowing from literary fiction, the likes of Tom Wolfe, Guy Talese and Terry Southern introduced the personal narrative style, quoting conversations verbatim, reporting everyday details about their subjects, and the third-person point-of-view (from inside the head of the character). With its informal, slang and pop culture words, this love child of the times caught the zeitgeist of the 1960s and the 1970s very well.
Seeds of Internet journalism
Hunter Tompson's "gonzo journalism" went even further with his drug-induced stream of consciousness style. His best-known report "Fear and Loathing is Las Vegas" may be credited with starting the trend of calling politicians names in print. `Gonzo' is South Boston Irish slang describing the last man standing after a drinking marathon.
The seeds of what became the Internet style of journalistic writing were sown by new and gonzo journalists. But the forerunners had to depend on magazines to see their work in print. Now anybody with rudimentary technical savvy can start blogs and become Internet journalists.
A blog, for those who have not heard about this remarkable development in information sharing, is short for weblog, a website where entries are made (as in a journal or diary). Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries.
"Full disclosure journalism" refers to disclosing the interests of the writer, which may bear on the subject being written about, for example, if the writer has worked with an interview subject in the past.
A "Wordspeak" column (May 4, 2003) that looked at words that gained currency during Gulf War II described `embedded journalism' by embeds or news reporters who were attached to a U.S. military unit involved in an armed conflict. As such reporting was a bit too sympathetic to the American side of the war, it led to use of the alternate term `inbedded journalist" or "inbeds".
A tabloid originally meant "small tablet of medicine", then was used figuratively to mean a compressed form or dose of anything, hence tabloid journalism (1901), and newspapers that typified it (1918), that has small pages, short articles, and lots of photographs. Tabloids are often considered to be less serious than other newspapers printed on large sized paper (broadsheets).
Yellow journalism, the term for sensationalism in the media, originally was a "publicity stunt use of coloured ink" (1895) for the popular Yellow Kid character (his clothes were yellow) in the comic strip "Shantytown" in the New York World.
In an e-mail in response to the last month's column that quoted `peoplerazzi' as one of the new words in journalism, Rick Robinson claimed to be the first to use the term. More about it at http://www.mediacenterblog.org/2006/02/welcome_peopler_1/.
E-mail the writer at anand@journalist.com
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