***** COCHRAN****** EJC/REC Vol. 7, No. 2, 1997 ************


JOURNALISM'S NEW GEOGRAPHY:  HOW ELECTRONIC TOOLS ALTER
THE CULTURE AND PRACTICE OF NEWSGATHERING


Wendell Cochran
American University



        Abstract.  The culture and practices of
     newsgathering were shaped largely by a fact of
     geography:  In order to report effectively,
     journalists were required to go where the "news"
     was occurring.  The World Wide Web and other
     electronic tools, which are being used widely by
     journalists, turn this notion on its head.  This
     geographic imperative helped determine the kinds
     of people who were attracted to journalism, the
     relative prestige of various reporting assignments
     and tasks and other dimensions of the newsroom
     culture.  While the need to seek out the news --
     to visit news sources, to attend some events -
     continues in many circumstances, the author argues
     that many journalistic practices will be altered
     as electronic newsgathering gains steam among
     practitioners.  In fact, the paper contends, the
     development of increasingly sophisticated
     mechanisms, such as online databases and remote
     satellite imagery, as newsgathering instruments
     means that journalists can be more efficient and
     more thorough if they do not physically seek
     out sources and rely, instead, on electronic tools
     to help them gather and analyze information.
     Examples of ways journalists are using these new
     methods are included.


     Several hundred times during the summer and fall of
1996, journalists from around the nation logged into a World
Wide Web site at American University in Washington, DC,
(http://www.soc.american.edu/campfin) to retrieve
information about political contributions being made to
candidates for federal offices.  Usually, they spent fewer
than five minutes getting the files they needed.
Altogether, these reporters downloaded considerably more
than 1 billion bytes of data, information which previously
had only been readily accessible as paper records stored in
government offices in Washington and in state capitals
scattered across the United States.  Many of the journalists
who availed themselves of this service had never before had
access to this information and data.  Ned Seaton of the
Manhattan, KS, _Mercury_, was a typical user.  In a private
e-mail message to the author, he wrote.  "Just wanted to say
that your Web site with the FEC data is terrific.  I work at
the Manhattan Mercury! in Manhattan, KS.  We were able to
spin out local stories about Manhattan-area contributions to
candidates in the two U.S.  Senate races here in Kansas.
That kind of thing was awfully hard to do before, and we
appreciate your help in making the data accessible.  Just
FYI we downloaded the data, sorted it out using FoxPro and
then did calculations in Excel.  I learned about its
availability through the CARR listserv."  [1].

     This is a powerful example of how journalism, in
particular print journalism, where images are less important
than in broadcast journalism, might be practiced in the
future.  Without ever leaving his office, Seaton had
instantaneous access to information and data.  On his
desktop he had sophisticated electronic tools to help him
analyze and understand the data he gathered.  Seaton even
learned that the data were available from an Internet
mailing list devoted to telling journalists about electronic
resources.  What he was practicing is a journalism without
walls or geographical bounds, in effect, "distance
journalism."  (The author gratefully acknowledges that this
phrase was coined by Professor Philip Meyer in a
conversation about this paper.)  Contrast this approach to
gathering news to the traditional one used in the "Be a
Reporter" exhibit at the Freedom Forum's newly opened
Newseum in Arlington, VA.  In the exercise at the museum, a
would-be journalist follows an intriguing story line about
tainted food at a school cafeteria by going to a series of
places in a mythical small town to conduct interviews and
retrieve documents.  The exercise, though not intending to,
makes the point that the reporter can only get certain
information by being in a certain place; in other words, it
demonstrates the limits that geography has traditionally
imposed on newsgathering.  The Internet and other electronic
means can remove or transcend those geographical barriers.

     Seaton and thousands of other journalists who are
making use of the World Wide Web and other electronic
newsgathering tools part of their daily routine, are
reshaping not only the practice, but also the culture of
journalism.  Because the Federal Election Commission
information was being retrieved electronically, it did not
matter either where the data were stored or where the
recipient was located.  In these and similar transactions,
the geography of journalism -- the spatial relationship
between reporter and source -- is being changed as
fundamentally as the telegraph separated the act of
transportation from the act of communication.  The Internet
is helping create a world in which reporters can "do their
jobs better no matter where they are physically located"
[2].  That reality surely will precipitate changes in the
culture and practices of journalism in general and
newsgathering in particular.  What will follow from new ways
of gathering information and interacting with sources are
new definitions of news, new criteria for judging
reportorial prowess and success, even a new lexicon to
describe the craft of reporting.  Of course, only time will
determine the precise nature of the changes the Internet
will produce in the way journalism is done.  And the changes
will not come without considerable resistance from those who
believe the established customs are the best way, if not the
only way, to practice journalism.

     The influence of geography on newsgathering, just as
the influence of geography on any culture, is inescapable.
Accidents or imperatives of geography shape every
civilization, every institution.  In any society, geography
influences the foods that are eaten, the clothes that are
worn, the gods that are worshipped, the language that is
spoken, the physical and mental traits that are valued and
rewarded.  That is no less true of journalism than it is for
any other culture.  For centuries, the geographic
relationship between the journalist and the sources of news
has been simple:  The journalist was required to go where
the information was located.  Because that is what reporters
did, that is what reporters became:  People who went
searching for news, and who defined news by what they found
in their travels.  It happened as inevitably as the Sioux
became a people who followed the buffalo herds, whose diet
and nutrition depended on the buffalo, whose clothes came
from the buffalo, whose tribal hierarchy was determined, in
part, by which members were the best buffalo hunters.  Thus,
it is no surprise that many practitioners of the
newsgathering craft believe that what they have learned to
do is what nature intended journalism to be.  In a review of
the Newseum Henry Allen of the _Washington Post_ writes:  "I
get nervous when the whole place keeps telling me that
something important is going on inside (emphasis added)
newsrooms.  It may be, but the news business is founded on
the principle that something far more important is always
going on *outside* (emphasis added) newsrooms - reality, the
world, everything, anything" [3].

     As one contemplates the traditional practice of
journalism, even at its most elementary levels, geography
comes immediately into play.  One of the five basics of news
writing, taught to every beginning journalist, is to state
where the news occurred, and to preferably include that
information in the lead paragraph of the story.  This
emphasis on place in writing is closely connected to the
concept of proximity, which is classified as one of the key
determinants of how important a story is deemed to be.
Simply put, the closer the story to the reader, the bigger
the news.  Thus, as anyone who has ever been spent time in a
newsroom knows, a bus wreck in Russia is less "newsworthy"
than a bus wreck next door.  Geography also plays a more
subtle role in the determination of what constitutes news.
Specifically, is "news" simply the reflection of activities
and events that occur in the natural world?  This would seem
to be Allen's view and the view of many journalists.  If so,
journalists would be required to transport themselves to
where these events are happening because there would be
nothing else on which to report.  Sports reporters, for
example, largely follow this model.  They don't cover games
on the radio or television, they go see for themselves.
(Even the word "cover" has geographical connotations).
Political reporters assigned to conventions and legislatures
go directly to the locus of newsmaking activities because
they have little choice, although Congressional reporters
increasingly use C-Span to assist in their coverage of daily
floor activities.

     Most contemporary analysts would argue that this view
of news as being the simple reporting of naturally occurring
events is much too simplistic.  Instead, they see news as
being a construct in which reporters assemble "news" from a
variety of parts -- the statements of sources, the
observations of the reporter, tempered by the reporter's
judgments and values, the professional work of the
journalist in producing stories, the business needs and aims
of the publication or broadcast outlet.  Or, as Gaye Tuchman
would have it, "...the act of making news is the act of
constructing reality itself rather than a picture of
reality."  [4] News is not, then, a consistent commodity.
It changes according to who is collecting it, who they are
collecting it for, what their organization needs at the
moment and dozens of other variables.

     Journalists, particularly investigative journalists,
long have seen the reporting function as being more than a
transcription of events, arguing instead for the power to
probe beneath the surface of events in order to provide
context and meaning.  News, in this construction, is
something that, like ore, has to be prospected for, mined,
recovered, and processed.  To describe themselves,
journalists speak, in admiring tones, of the "digging
reporter," who unearths gems of information.  To be a
reporter, then in this construction, was to be a troubadour,
a seeker, a wanderer through life.  This person was required
to pause frequently to determine whether he (or,
increasingly, she) was in the presence of news.

     This system of newsgathering, in which the journalist
was expected to seek out sources, to interact frequently
with a diverse set of individuals, helped determine the type
of person who was attracted to the pursuit of reporting.  It
placed a high importance on the personality of the
journalist.  One thirty-year-old textbook says, "The
reporter should develop as many sources of news as possible.
This requires that he be gregarious - that he develop a
friendliness with the stenographers and clerks in the public
offices as well as with the officers themselves" [5].  Other
traits useful to reporters, according to the text, are
curiosity, a critical sense and resourcefulness [6].  In
other words, the emphasis was placed largely on the
instinctive or intuitive abilities or powers of the
journalist; conversely, less attention was paid to the
analytical or intellectual skills that might be employed.

     In deference to the physical reality that a person
cannot be in more than one place at the same time, beats
were born to facilitate coverage of a particular location.
Working through these beats was part of the way that
beginning journalists were trained in the craft and by which
they were inculcated in the traditions and culture of the
news business.  Generations of young reporters have cut
their journalistic teeth making the daily rounds of the
police station, the courthouse, city hall, the federal
building, and the other places where sources or potential
sources reside, waiting to impart wisdom to the enterprising
journalist.  I have particularly vivid memories of a
balding, besotted West Virginia justice of the peace
dispensing tidbits of information about traffic violators
and other scofflaws in a room that reeked of stale alcohol.
Likewise, the geographic metaphor carried over to news
organizations, which traditionally have city desks to manage
local coverage, wire desks to handle stories from distant
places where the paper has no staff stationed; larger papers
have state, regional and national desks as well.  This
structure also facilitates the centralized collection of
news, an economic aim of news organizations [7].

     Geography helped define the standing and prestige of
journalists inside news organizations.  Once the technology
of the telegraph helped give rise to the system of bureaus
in state capitals, Washington, and major cities of the
world, being assigned to one of those distant locations
became a career goal.  "Washington is the goal of every
political junkie, the pinnacle for journalists fascinated by
the human hodgepodge we call government.  The chance to
cover Washington should be and often is the reward for
distinguished reporting at city hall or the statehouse,"
former Washington journalist Don Campbell writes in "Inside
the Beltway," his study of reporting in the capital [8].
The foreign correspondent, played so dashingly by Hollywood
leading men, became a romantic ideal -- proving that
reporters would go to the ends of the earth to hunt for news
and, not incidentally, be rewarded for their quest for truth
with the embrace of beautiful women.

     For those still tied to the home office, travel became
an accepted part, even a sought-after part, of a reporter's
life.  Journalists with the freedom and portfolio to travel
were envied; beats that came with room to roam were
considered plums.  For example, in the heady days of the
late 1970s, before money worries overcame the Des Moines
Register, all a reporter there had to do to go anywhere in
Iowa was leave a note on the editor's desk, draw a cash
advance, and check out a company car.  In more penurious
newsrooms, fights over denied travel requests often provoked
or fueled reporters' enmity toward management.  Long before
the advent of the Internet, publishers, hoping among other
things, to hold down travel costs, embraced the telephone,
and the facsimile machine as ways to connect journalists and
sources.  (This did not, of course, stop management from
inspecting telephone bills with the eye of Scrooge.  Many
reporters can tell legendary tales about editors' rants over
the cost of the telephone.  Once an irate managing editor
fumed at the author for making a 20-cent long distance call
to double check a police source.)

     Journalists rightly claim that on-site reporting is an
invaluable newsgathering technique.  Indeed, for many types
of stories, it is indispensable.  Many of my own most
memorable experiences as a reporter come from the times when
I was "on the scene," at mine disasters, political rallies,
fires, floods, and other events.  However, the reality also
is that this need, or desire, to go where the "news" is made
has shaped journalists' perceptions and definitions of news.
Specifically, news became what sources said it was, giving
them considerable practical control over what was reported
or not reported.  Thus, the role of the journalist became
passive, not active.  Reporters in this mold are mirrors,
not analysts, of information they receive.  This role, as it
happened, melded neatly with the emerging economic pressures
that made objectivity the orthodoxy -- the unchallenged way
to practice journalism.

     Geography shaped the definition of news in other ways,
as well.  Stories about government agencies and politics
became paramount because it was to government buildings that
journalists went to find news.  Bush, for example, defines
beats as "those public places in which news events are
recorded (e.g., a police station) or in which public affairs
news develops (e.g., the city hall)" [9].  Using this
traditional definition of the locus of news, much potential
news was ignored, at least partly because the places where
it occurred were invisible to the typical journalist.  When
editors have recognized that this approach leaves large
parts of life uncovered their attempts to bring about change
have run into resistance from the entrenched culture.  For
example, when the Orange County Register not long ago
decided to assign journalists to cover shopping malls as a
way of breaking the usual mold, the move was seen by some as
heresy.  N. Christian Anderson, editor of the newspaper when
it made the changes in 1990, told _Editor & Publisher_, that
the new system "brought a lot of anxiety in the newsroom . .
. People weren't sure of what they'd be doing.  Some were
very upset.  They thought there would be a downplay of hard
news - that the place was going to hell in a handbasket and
that this was not really bona fide journalism" [10].  In
fairness, it also should be noted that even vast reaches of
local, state and government bureaucracies attract little
attention from journalists.  Campbell says ". . . news
organizations in Washington spend little time and effort
examining what goes on" in the large federal agencies.  [11]
Frequently, this inattention to news that was not defined by
sources in city hall, or the Capitol, or the White House has
had enormous public policy consequences.  The energy-related
economic troubles of the late 1970s and early 1980s were
poorly reported in part because newsrooms had few reporters
or editors with knowledge about, or interest in, business
and economics.  Later, it was not until the savings and loan
crisis became a political crisis that it made front pages
and evening news broadcasts in most cities.  In this sense,
journalists, limited by their culture, gave proof to the
adage, "Out of sight, out of mind."

     It would be wrong, of course, to argue that the
accidents of geography are the lone forces shaping the
culture of news and newsgathering.  The public needs to have
the trained eyes and ears of journalists present at
important, interesting or entertaining events if it is to
make sense of the welter of details that surround them.
Making the rounds of government buildings is an important
way of gathering news, and it has many benefits.  Official
sources have a right, and a need, to get their messages
across to the public.  Government actions shape the lives of
every citizen.  Unwatched bureaucracies become weak and
corrupt.  Unnoticed officials become unresponsive.
Additionally, physical presence sometimes can provide ways
to verify information collected by other means of reporting.
Some stories just cannot be written without personal
observation.  For example, the powerful accounts of torture
in Serbian prison camps in Bosnia would have been sterile
without the informed rage of reporters who had witnessed the
treatment of the people held there.

     Pre-digital journalists could gain an advantage over
their competitors by traveling to the site of information.
For example, to see paper copies of campaign finance
reports, one must go to a state capital or to the Federal
Election Commission headquarters in Washington.  Before the
data were computerized, those were the only places those
records were accessible.  The result, of course, is that few
reporters outside the cities where the records were housed
ever used them, and that millions of readers/viewers were
denied the benefits of the so-called "public disclosure" of
campaign records.  The Internet's "virtual geography," in
which the sense of "place" loses much of its meaning, causes
much of the "travel advantage" to disappear.  In many
instances reporters will not be able to "go" where the
information is because there is no place to go, or if they
do make the trip, they will find it provided them with no
benefit.  Take again, as an example, the campaign finance
files provided by American University.  The files are
physically stored on a computer in Washington, DC.  But they
could, literally, be anywhere in the world with scarcely any
disadvantage to any potential user.  Where, then, do you
"go" to obtain this data?  The short answer is nowhere, or
anywhere.  It simply does not matter, because you have
virtually equal access from anyplace.  Coming to Washington
would provide a journalist no special advantage when it
comes to getting this data.  Indeed, it would take far more
time and be far more costly to travel to the data
"location," than to use a computer and Internet connection
at home.  Even if the decision to travel to the data were
made, the journalist would have access to nothing she could
not have acquired in the place she left.  There are other
drawbacks to having to travel to get data and information.
If ten reporters show up at the North Carolina Secretary of
State's office at the same time to look at the same
candidate's campaign contributions file, nine will have
nothing to do during the time it is being accessed by one.
And to the extent that the traveling journalist loses
connections to her office-based resources, she is actually
less efficient as an information gatherer.  Because as a
virtual journalist, one can be many places at once, defying
the old physical laws of time and space.  A reporter
seeking, for example, background information on a
corporation can cover much more ground, much more quickly by
using the resources of the Internet.  In a matter of minutes
on the Internet, a journalist could retrieve Securities and
Exchange Commission documents about the company, find the
names of key company executives, discover whether federal
agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration had filed
actions against the company in question.  Leaving the office
to try to get any one piece of that information would
greatly restrict the reporter's ability to find other
information.  In fact, as more real-time data become
available through satellite imagery, journalists will be
able to literally watch the whole world from the vantage of
their computer monitor.  Again, the value of traveling is
diminished, the importance of geographical location less
relevant.

     For those stories that do require journalists to travel
to observe an event or to do research for a story, as many
still will, the online world also offers powerful new ways
to work.  E-mail can help journalists stay in contact with
their home offices, without regard to time zones.  E-mail
also can help reporters keep in touch with sources they
aren't seeing because they are out of town.  Background
information remains readily accessible because the wired
journalist is no longer constrained by the weight of the
files he is willing to carry on an airplane.  Archives can
be accessed easily, which means fewer late-night telephone
calls to sleepy librarians.  Online editions can solve the
familiar problem of not being able to see how a story was
edited and played when journalists are traveling in an area
where their paper does not circulate.

     Moreover, it is increasingly clear that "being there"
does not automatically produce better journalism.  Hundreds
of reporters were in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, but
they were prisoners of the military's public relations
mechanism.  For the most part they went where they were
escorted, and they reported only what they were told in
official briefings.  An extreme example of the stories they
missed was the demolition of a weapons storage depot during
which hundreds of United States soldiers apparently were
exposed to chemical agents.  Political reporters who cover
presidential campaigns or the White House often find
themselves bottled up in defined spaces, cut off from
sources and spoon fed what the candidates and incumbents
want them to have.  What being there does provide is drama,
pathos, and provocative images, fodder for anecdotal leads
-- the stuff of passion and emotion.  Those all have their
place in journalism.  But they are not sufficient.  What
journalism should provide in addition to emotion is
understanding, analysis, and context.  And it is in these
areas that the Internet and other tools used by
computer-assisted journalists begin to make their real mark
on the craft.  It is also in this realm that the tools will
most drastically alter the cultural practices, and
ultimately, the definition of journalism and news.

     The changes could begin with new approaches to sources.
For several years, I have been teaching students that there
is a hierarchy of sources, which could be roughly sketched
in this fashion:

=======================================================================


Fig. 1 Hierarchy of sources

             Human
________________________________

           Documents
________________________________

          Raw Material

=======================================================================


     And, I assert, the deeper one goes in the hierarchy,
the more reliable the information becomes.  From this simple
sketch it is clear that journalists traditionally have
relied most heavily on the least reliable type of sources,
humans.  Unfortunately, too many journalists stop at the
top, believing their reporting is complete when they have
talked to someone on "both sides" of an issue.  What
computer-assisted journalism does, greatly boosted by the
increasing availability of information on the Internet, is
permit fuller access to the data, statistics and facts that
are the raw materials of news.  Conversely, it should make
journalists less reliant on the faulty memories, the
wrongheaded notions, and the outright lies of our human
sources.  Just to give one example of how this approach
improves journalism, again from the world of campaign
finance reporting:  The commonly held belief is that it is
the cost of television advertising that is driving up the
price of political campaigns.  But, when the data were
computerized and analyzed by Dwight Morris, then with the
Los Angeles Times, it was revealed that advertising, of any
type, accounts for less than a third of total spending on
Congressional races [12].  In many ways, this kind of work
is the logical outgrowth of Meyer's 25-year-old notion of
precision journalism.  Meyer's central view is that "we
journalists would be wrong less often if we adapted to our
own use some of the tools of the social scientists" [13].

     By extension, Meyer was suggesting that journalists
should rely more on their own research, theories, and
analysis and less on their traditional sources.  The
journalist becomes a more important player in the
development of "news," and the "source" a less important
player in this construction.  Fortunately, the tools of the
computer age facilitate that switch in approach.  Let me
cite an example from my own career.  In the late 1980s,
while at Gannett News Service, I directed a computerized
study of the nation's savings and loan industry.  As part of
the analysis, we recomputed the S&L financial results using
Generally Accepted Accounting Principles at a time when the
industry was using a flawed system of regulatory accounting
that masked its true difficulties.  While we had extensive
discussions with experts about how to conduct this study, in
the end it was our work - we were the sources.  What we
started with was simply statistical raw material - computer
tapes containing the financial results of every savings and
loan in the nation.  When we finished there were no sources
who could give us quotes to verify our work, because no one
else had done this analysis.  We found, in Meyer's terms, "a
more solid base of fact from which to leap" [14].  The
stories we wrote and the charts we published in USA TODAY
and elsewhere painted a vivid portrait of an industry on the
brink of collapse [15].  We were able to identify specific
institutions that were at the greatest risk of failure.
Although many industry sources challenged the conclusions,
they were not able to argue with the data or the analytical
methods used.  This approach unnerves many editors and
reporters.  One editor asked if we planned to call every S&L
in the nation to verify each number we intended to publish.
The answer was no, we were going to rely on the data
reported to the federal government and our analysis of those
data.

     Donald Barlett and James Steele, formerly of the
Philadelphia Inquirer, ran into a storm of controversy over
their 1991 series _America:  What Went Wrong?_, at least
partly because of their reporting techniques.  Author Steve
Weinberg, analyzing the series, says:

     Barlett-Steele have developed a new kind of
     journalism, unprecedented in its scope (trying to
     explain the economic and resultant social
     breakdown of an entire society through
     investigative reporting rather than philosophy)
     and in its sophisticated, hybrid techniques
     (computer-assisted reporting using databases kept
     by government agencies, creating of original
     databases that uncover new realities, author
     analysis of the conventional wisdom, outright
     debunking and proposing solutions).[16]

News, in this construction, remains something to be dug
out.  But the tools of the news miner are changed.  There is
less reliance on interviews and more use of mathematics.
Analyzing huge datasets, which can add breadth and depth to
stories, is technically simple, though it requires new
training.  There can be more attention paid to the outcomes
of policy decisions and less to the personalities of those
who make the decisions.  Journalists using computer
techniques can find new ways to categorize information,
methods that should permit them to do a better job of
identifying the factors that determine why, for example,
some school systems do a better job educating children than
others.

     The day has not yet come when this kind of analytical
journalism is the rule in newsrooms.  In much of this work
there is little romance or glory.  Journalists fret over
losing the human touch (and no one would advocate getting
rid of good "street reporters"); many passionately resist
learning and applying statistical skills; they correctly
point out that much data and information is not accessible
electronically, and that much of it is also subject to human
errors.  Some, frankly, do not see the value of spending the
time and effort necessary to conduct these analyses when a
journalist could more easily "call up a couple of people" to
get their views.  This means, of course, that not everyone
who has previously been attracted to journalism as a career
will find it to their liking in the future.  We will need
new sets of skills, and, in large measure, that will require
people with different aptitudes to perform them.

     However, there are signs that the culture of the news
profession is changing.  One manifestation of this is that
in recent years, several Pulitzer Prizes and other
significant journalism awards have gone to computer-assisted
reporting projects, bestowing prestige on the reporters and
highlighting the value of these skills to top-level
practitioners.  Publishers have invested heavily in computer
resources and computer training; increasingly they are
asking for computer skills when they hire entry-level
reporters and editors.  Perhaps most intriguingly, there
also seem to be some indications that the public appreciates
this way of doing journalism.  When Barlett and Steele's
series was published, response from readers was dramatic:
Circulation at the Inquirer rose; the reporters fielded
20,000 calls and letters; 500,000 reprints were distributed,
and the series was made into a best-selling book [17].

     Could it be that this "hybrid style" of journalism,
fueled by worldwide access to information via the Internet,
will be able to re-establish the link between news and news
audiences?  That, of course, would be the desired outcome.
The question is whether the practitioners of this journalism
can gain enough power and leverage in their own
organizations to make this new way of "making news" the
dominant culture of journalism.

                         References

     [1] Seaton, Ned.  Private E-mail to author, 1996.
Subscriptions to the CARR-L listserv can be addressed to
Listserv@ulkyvm.louisville.edu.  In the body of the message
type SUBSCRIBE (your name).

     [2] Reddick, Randy and King, Elliot, The Online
Journalist, Harcourt, Brace & Co., Ft.  Worth, TX, 1997, 4.

     [3] Allen, Henry, "Read All About It," Washington Post,
April 18, 1997, C2.

     [4] Tuchman, Gaye, Making News:  A Study in the
Construction of Reality, New York:  The Free Press, 1978,
12.

     [5] Bush, Chilton R, Newswriting and Reporting Public
Affairs, Philadelphia:  Chilton Books, 1965, 22.

     [6] Bush, 22-23.

     [7] Tuchman, 25-26.

     [8] Campbell, Don, Inside the Beltway:  A Guide to
Washington Reporting, Iowa State University Press, 1991, 3.	

     [9] Bush, 19.

     [10] Stein, M.L. "Newspapers without Walls," Editor &
Publisher, June 2, 1990, Vol. 123, No. 22, 7-8.

     [11] Campbell, 79.

     [12] Morris, Dwight and Gamache, Murielle E.,
Gold-Plated Politics:  The 1992 Congressional Races,
Washington:  Congressional Quarterly, 1994, 28.

     [13] Meyer, Philip.  Precision Journalism, Bloomington,
IN:  Indiana University Press, 1973, 3.

     [14] Meyer, 13.

     [15] Cochran, Wendell and Cauchon, Dennis, USA TODAY,
Feb. 12, 1989, A1.

     [16] Weinberg, Steve, "The work of Barlett & Steele:
Why is it so controversial?"  IRE Journal, January-February
1997.  Vol. 20, No. 1, 9-11.

     [17] Weinberg, 9.
************************************************************

Author Information: Wendell Cochran
                    Assistant Professor
                    School of Communication
                    American University
                    4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW
                    Washington, DC 20016-8017
                    cochran@american.edu
                    202 885-2075 fax: 202 885-2099
***********************************************************
                       Copyright 1997
  Communication Institute for Online Scholarship, Inc.

     This file may not be publicly distributed or reproduced
without written permission of the Communication Institute
for Online Scholarship, P.O.  Box 57, Rotterdam Jct., NY
12150 USA (phone:  518-887-2443).