Mobile journalists, or “mojos,” in training. (Credit: Allissa Richardson/Flickr/Creative Commons License

On April 19 to 20, more than 300 journalists from around the world descended on Austin for a sold-out conference on online journalism. The International Symposium of Online Journalism, hosted by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin, featured a host of new media gurus discussing everything from “mojos” to data visualization. A selection of takeaways:

Don’t focus on building your own online community; insert your site into already established communities.

Deseret News, a Mormon owned news brand “for faith and family oriented audiences in Utah and around the world,” has grown its social media presence and views exponentially in recent years. The secret, according to Clark Gable, president and CEO of Deseret Publishing Company, was “finding the conversation people were already having” and then inserting their content into the flow.

The first step to being able to do that, Gables said, is to determine your publication’s unique niche (in the case of Deseret News, family values are high on the list). He emphasized that, in an online realm, it should be about what you are best at not only in your own community, but also in the world, since your audience is not limited by geography. “If you don’t know what you’re going to be good at,” he said, “you don’t know what the conversation is going to be.”

Gables provided Forbes and The Atlantic as two brands that have excelled at identifying what they are best at and then inserting their brand into existing conversations.

Data teams are on the rise, as is the demand for people who know how to manipulate and visualize data.

Data was hot at the symposium, just as it was at the Online News Association’s conference last fall.  Jennifer Carroll, senior editor and VP for content at Gannett, said her organization is expanding its data staff. Investigative News Network, in partnership with Investigative Reporters and Editors, is also hiring a data reporter.

At the Texas Tribune, databases — particularly of public employee salaries — have been one of the site’s greatest successes, said John Thornton, the paper’s chairman and founder. In a talk with Latin American journalists, Thornton said that came as a surprise — calling it data “porn.”

Figuring out how to not only manipulate large data sets but also display them visually was another theme. Kim Rees, partner and head of data visualization at Periscopic, shared a stunning and devastating visualization of the number of Americans who have died due to gun violence, along with the corresponding years of lost life.

Screen capture of interactive data visualization produced by Periscopic.

University of Miami Professor Alberto Cairo summed up the value of graphic literacy to digital journalists this way: “Friends don’t let friends use pie charts.”

Engagement is not clicking a “like” button.

NPR’s Andy Carvin opened his talk about online engagement by sharing how social media gets things wrong. He started with his own experience tweeting erroneously about former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords’ death.

“How often do we post reports without a third source, or even a second one, to back it up?” Carvin asked. “How many of us have typed up a tweet for a major news Twitter account and hesitated before hitting the send button, wondering, what if we’ve screwed this up? And how many of us have hit the button anyway?”

The role that journalists can play in social media, Carvin argued, is a two-way street of helping the public “become better consumers and producers of information — and hopefully achieve their full potential as active participants in civil society.” Crucial to that, he said, is being transparent about what we know and what we don’t know, actively addressing rumors that are circulating online, and challenging the public to scrutinize them:

“Why aren’t we engaging the public more directly? I don’t mean engagement like encouraging them to ‘like’ us on Facebook or click the retweet button. That is not engagement. By engagement I mean, why don’t we use these incredibly powerful tools to talk with them, listen to them, and help us all understand the world a little better? Perhaps we can even use social media to do the exact opposite of its reputation – to slow down the news cycle, help us catch our collective breaths and scrutinize what’s happening with greater mindfulness.” Read the full transcript»

The question of how to create meaningful engagement was also the focus of an award-winning academic study, “40 Million Page Views is Not Enough: An Examination of the Christian Science Monitor’s Evolution from SEO to Engagement.” One of the paper’s authors, Jonathan Groves, a professor at Drury University, noted that at the Monitor they were getting high traffic, but not for their award-winning — and expensive — international coverage (Disclaimer: I reported from Spain and Germany for the Monitor). Instead, the uptick tended to come from national coverage and polls. Groves, who authored the paper with Professor Carrie Brown Smith at the University of Memphis, concluded the problem was primarily that the Monitor was conducting a one-way conversation with its readers and needed to find better ways to meaningfully engage them.

“Mojo” is on the rise.

Another focus of some conference presenters was on how to use mobile low-cost tools to train journalism students — and residents — to become “mojos,” or mobile journalists, so they can report their own stories.

Ivo Burum, a former Australian Broadcast Company reporter, has been working with indigenous aborigines and other marginalized communities, training them to report their own stories using mobile video techniques. He said that the equipment costs are under $400 a person, and some participants have gone on to be paid correspondents for broadcasting companies. “At the end of four hours everybody has a video,” Burum said. “They can’t believe it.” An editor from a Danish tabloid newspaper, Ekstra Bladet, was so impressed with the technique that now Burum is training reporters from the newsroom and developing a web television presence with them.

A mobile journalism rig. (Credit: Allissa Richardson/Flickr/Creative Commons License

Alissa Richardson, a professor at Bowie State University, is teaching similar mobile techniques to all of her students and to young people from at-risk backgrounds. She also trains girls abroad in conjunction with Global Girls media.

Forget J-schools as teaching hospitals; think entrepreneurial models.

David Ryfe, a professor at the University of Nevada-Reno, shared findings from a paper he wrote with his colleague Professor Donica Mensing on the concept that journalism students can help fill the void in local reporting. The paper, which also won an award at the symposium, explained that the difference between this model and a teaching hospital is that doctors are “committed to a profession that will reward them when they’re done in terms of prestige and income.” Journalism is not that today. Instead, the “newspaper industry is imploding,” and this model “sends people to fill in the gaps left behind.”

Ryfe urged educators to pivot away from a professional model that no longer exists and to examine new models instead. Students can do work for publication, but it should focus on experimentation rather than transferring the legacy newsroom to the university. Echoing a recurring theme at the conference, he also noted that the skills learned in J-school can be used elsewhere. A good point,, but if you happen to be paying for that journalism education, those are very expensive auxiliary skills.

Marathon explosion scene (Aaron Tang/Wikimedia Commons)

The media has had a hard time reporting the search for a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing since the explosions killed three and injured about 100 Monday. CNN and the Associated Press battled with NBC News on Twitter Wednesday morning, each news site claiming that authorities had either found a suspect or hadn’t. The New York Post reported on Monday that 12 people had been killed, citing a federal law enforcement source. In light of the media’s confusion, the Dart Center re-posted a compilation of advice they solicited from several journalists following the shootings in Tucson in 2012.

Editors, freelancers, broadcasters and international reporters shared different anecdotal lessons from covering various tragedies like the Oklahoma and Madrid bombings. Here are some highlights:

Scott Wallace, freelance journalist: “Above all, forget trying to ‘scoop’ your colleagues on this story.”

Steven Gorelick, professor of media studies at Hunter College: “Be very careful about the experts you select as sources. These kinds of high-profile stories are magnets for everyone from legitimate scholars and practitioners to self-proclaimed ‘profilers.’”

Lena Jakobsseon, TV producer: “Chasing victims’ family members down the street seems like a far more reasonable idea if CNN and MSNBC and FOX and all the nets are doing it, too, and you’re about to get yelled at if you don’t get that video. But you always have at least a few seconds to stop and listen to what your gut is telling you. Ratings come and go. The impact on your integrity, and on the people you’re covering — that stays.”

Read the whole compilation here.

Credit: Anthony Mattox/Flickr/Creative Commons License

Journalism is not in crisis. The media industry — and journalists — might be, but the journalism itself is actually improving.

Such is the argument made by international documentary filmmaker Bregtje van der Haak and Annenberg professors Michael Parks and Manuel Castells in a recently published article about “Networked Journalism.”

As the authors see it, the problem is that most of the doomsayers mix the concept of journalism with the business of journalism. In their article, journalism is defined as the “production of reliable information and analysis needed for the adequate performance of a democratic society.” Not mentioned in the definition are “profits,” “professional journalists” or “traditional publishers.” Just the pursuit of reliable information.

When the authors discussed their paper at Annenberg last week, Castells started by saying, “This is the beginning of the golden age of journalism.” People have greater selection and better access to information than ever before to help make democracies perform better. Or to make democracy happen in the first place, as we’ve seen in several “Twitter revolutions” in recent years.

But the golden age comes with a few caveats for traditional journalists. “Journalist” is no longer defined by background, schooling, and salary, but by the contribution to the expanding body of reliable information about the world.

Making that contribution is getting harder. Van der Haak predicted that “robots will produce most of the basic stories we see in newspapers today.” And the more developed automated journalism becomes, the more journalists will have to specialize in interpretation, analysis and storytelling. Mere transmitting of information doesn’t count as a meaningful contribution, since anyone with a cell phone and a Twitter account can do it.

This is where the power of networking comes in. In networked journalism, journalists are not working alone at their desks but instead act as nodes of the network, adding value instead of competing against each other. Journalists collect different feeds from various sources and create a meaningful version of the story, contributing to the body of information already available. With  networked journalism, they can optimize resources and generate synergy, and new creativity will emerge from our sharing. It is very similar to any other industry in a networked society.

This will mean growing pains for journalists. In a networked system, “pointing all the microphones at the same time at the same person” doesn’t make sense, as van der Haak noted. Instead of sending all the reporters to City Hall to listen to the mayor’s speech, a news organization might serve readers better by fact-checking the speech in real time at the office.

Michael Parks noted that journalism is evolving far more rapidly than journalists are. The most sought-after skills in journalism will be analytical capacity and the ability to network. This is what the authors call “sense-making,” or professional processing and understanding of information.

And this is where the authors hit their most controversial point. They argue that “not objectivity, but transparency and independence are vital for journalism to be credible in the 21st century.” People have multiple sources of information and they are more aware about how all of the sources serve some sort of interest. It might be political, as it is in partisan media, or financial, as it is in traditional, for-profit publishing.

In this environment, the authors write, “journalism with a clear perspective is more convincing than neutral narrative, and there is increasing value placed on the voice or vision embedded in the story — that is, on a point of view. This, however, calls for analysis grounded in reporting, not opinion or ideology.”

And this, according to the authors, will distinguish the journalism from the “informed bewilderment” that the world has become. Networked journalism is not a threat to quality or to the independence of professional journalists but rather a liberation from corporate control. But it requires a massive shift in the minds of professional journalists, who are taught to determine the value of journalism by which organization produces it, instead of measuring its value to the vast body of information we already have on the Internet.

So next time you read that “journalism is in crisis” and start getting depressed about the state of the media and our democracy, make sure the author is actually referring to journalism — not the industry or the profession of journalists, but the actual “journalism.” Because while journalists may have their work cut out for them, journalism itself is thriving.

The aftermath of the explosions (Russavia/Wikimedia Commons)

With the rapid speed of today’s media content production, journalists do not have hours to formulate theories or approaches to breaking news stories, especially not deadly emergencies like Monday’s Boston Marathon explosions. Tanveer Ali, in a post for the Columbia Journalism Review, urges journalists to use caution when thinking about attaching the word “terrorism” to the attack that killed three and reportedly injured more than 100.

“The media has no role, since it has no expertise, in determining whether an act is one of terrorism or not,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism scholar at Georgetown University, in an email to Ali. “One thing is that they should resist pressing the authorities, pundits, and those who have specialized in studying terrorism for many decades to speculate on who may have done it and why.”

The White House did not label the attack an act of terrorism, though they said the FBI is investigating it as such. On Monday, CNN made an editorial decision to call the Boston event a terrorist attack, and in Europe papers like The Guardian called it a terror attack almost immediately.

Though the FBI even admits the definition of terrorism is hard to pin down, the term does represent a certain weight to Americans with a post-9/11 attitude about explosions. In a democracy where the media ultimately establishes terminology, Ali says it’s best for journalists to avoid the word “terrorism” until clearer notions of what happened prevail.

Boston Marathon runners in 2009 (Stewart Dawson/Wikimedia Commons)

The explosions at the Boston Marathon Monday revealed once again how new forms of social media allow for immediate, shot-from-the-hip reporting during emergencies and breaking news. While reporters tried to sort out whether reported explosions at Boston’s JFK library had any connection to the marathon explosions, a flood of tweets and Vine clips were posted with video and on-scene impressions as three people were reportedly killed and almost a hundred wounded.

Poynter did a Storify to sample the palette of approaches journalists took, including observations from on-scene reporters (“I saw people’s legs blown off…”) and direction to other sources where credible people were posting definite information. The flood of reporting also served to remind journalists that information should be confirmed before it’s retweeted or shouted out to the masses.

The Storify also included requests from sources who wanted to be left alone: “Jesus Christ reporters, leave us alone right now…” Some people also bemoaned CNN’s decision to call the situation a terrorist attack.

Credit: drumminhands/Flickr/Creative Commons License

Digital-only and hybrid digital-print subscriptions drove up total newspaper circulation revenue by 5 percent in 2012, according to a report released this week by the Newspaper Assn. of America. It marked the first circulation gains in a decade, and hinted that the industry’s adoption of website paywalls is starting to pay off.

Still, total newspaper revenue in 2012 declined by 2 percent to $38.6 billion from the previous year.

Circulation accounted for $10 billion of industry revenue in 2012, according to the report. While print subscriptions and single-copy sales declined 14 percent, digital-only and hybrid digital-print subscriptions increased by 275 percent and 499 percent respectively.

Newspapers also saw gains in new revenue streams, including digital marketing and advertising consulting services, e-commerce, transactions, and commercial print and delivery services.

“America’s newspaper media are transforming themselves,” said Caroline Little, president and CEO of the Newspaper Assn., in a statement. “In virtually every community they serve, newspapers have the biggest newsrooms, the best-known brands and significant audience market share. Now they are building on those to find new ways to serve audiences and local businesses.”

The report seems to support sentiment in the industry that after a decade of false starts, American newsrooms are finally proving to be incubators for successful 21^st century journalism models.

Legacy media like the Los Angeles Times have been experimenting with paywalls for years. When one model failed, they tried others, until something clicked.

“What I think is most exciting right now is that we are very much a start-up in a mature company,” said Jennifer Collins, vice president of digital revenue at Los Angeles’ biggest paper.

In 2003, the company attempted to “wall off” the content of its Entertainment section, CalendarLive.com, by charging a $4.95-per-month access fee. Within six months of the paywall’s implementation, visits to the site fell 61 percent. Users’ interactive engagement with the site plummeted 97 percent. It came down in 2005, just 21 months later.

The Los Angeles Times tried again in March 2012. This time, the paywall isn’t going anywhere.

As of March, 412 American papers were charging for their digital content, according to News & Tech, a trade publication pushing digital integration to news organizations. They include industry giants such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal as well as entire chains like Gannett, Tribune, MediaNews, and Media General.

Last summer, Ebyline sliced and diced an earlier version of these numbers to make a couple of observations worth noting: first, about a third of daily newspaper readers are affected by paywalls; and second, the trend toward paywalls is dominated by newspapers with high circulation numbers.

But paywalls aren’t limited to old media. In a counter-intuitive twist, digital-only media is following the lead of legacy media in the search for a second (to advertising) revenue stream online.

Investors are taking notice. In 2012, six of the eight publicly traded newspaper companies saw stock prices climb between 10.3 and 62.9 percent. The gains followed across-the-board losses in 2011.

The Orange County Register recently created a splash when it announced it would introduce a hard paywall (meaning no “first 10 articles for free” policy) with a single price — $1 per day for digital, print or both. Also arriving to the party in 2013 are Scripps, McClatchy, and The Washington Post.

Here’s a few more highlights from across the paywall landscape that tell the story in different ways:

New Chasing Old

In his most recent open experiment — the transition from a hired gun for The Daily Beast to independent blogger — we see Andrew Sullivan asking  readers to support his work (like scores of print publications before him). Sullivan wants readers to pay $19.99 (or more, if they like) to subscribe to his new venture. So far, it’s all gravy: in the first 24 hours of rolling out his paywall, he made a third of his million-dollar goal from almost 12,000 subscribers; after the first four weeks, he made half his goal. But he may have leaks in his own leaky meter model. The question, asks Hamish McKenzie, is if Sullivan can exceed the 1-percent rate established by The Times to convert unique visitors to paid subscribers.

A Mixed Bag for The Times

The New York Times has the most high-profile metered paywall in the business, and it’s no surprise observers were intensely interested in its most recent quarterly earnings report, which also summed up the entirety of 2012. Financially, The Times posted numbers that were down slightly from 2011. The good news was that the paper added 186,000 digital subscribers to increase its online-only subscriber base to 640,000. The bad news was that the gains in digital subscription were accompanied by losses in digital (and, of course, print) advertising revenue. In other words, The New York Times still can’t compete with folks like Google, Facebook, AOL, and Microsoft in attracting online advertising dollars. Newsonomics has more on the topic.

Six Principles Clark Gilbert Used to Transform Deseret News

Industry-wide, American newspapers today derive an average of 17 percent of their revenue from digital. The Deseret News and Deseret Digital Media average 45 percent a little more than three years after former Harvard Business School professor Clark Gilbert took over the company. The American Press Institute explains how he did it.

The newsonomics of paywalls all over the world 

These numbers are only a snapshot and come from some of the better practitioners of the digital pay craft. Many more are underachieving. The point is that there is an emerging playbook of how to get pay working right. Nieman Journalism Lab has an article boiling it down to the 5 P’s.

 Half of first year’s paywall revenue comes in first three months

Our-Hometown, a company that handles Web publishing for small community newspapers, has published a report showing the pace of digital subscription revenue for one site over about three years. 

(Columbia University/Wikimedia Commons)

With the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism recently hiring a new dean, media critics have been turning their eyes on journalism schools to postulate once again about whether or not elite programs help graduates get employed. Though many major media outlets like Gannett have laid off thousands of employees in the last 10 years, an article published by Crain’s New York suggests that the people who are actually getting hired are coming out of top journalism schools.

Looking at Columbia specifically, the article says that in 2012, 74 percent of a 354-person class had some kind of internship or minimal employment lined up before graduating. In 2006, only 52 percent were in that position. Other schools, such as the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, have seen similar improvements.

“That’s in part because of happy things, like our graduates are very talented and skilled,” Nicholas Lemann, the outgoing dean at Columbia, told Craig’s, “and in part unhappy things, like a 27-year-old coming out of this school is more desirable in the labor force than a 55-year-old who doesn’t have any digital skills.”

x_jamesmorris/Flickr/Creative Commons License

With so much attention given to social media and online community engagement, it’s easy to forget about the media’s capacity to foster something a little more old-fashioned: live, in-person conversations. As it turns out, the newly popular “community engagement manager” position is one of the rare growth spots in the industry. And various mainstream to digital-only media outlets — from St. Louis Beacon’s “Beacon & Eggs” to Berkelyside’s Three Michael’s to Public Insight Network members — are focusing on in-person meet-ups and forums.

At Alhambra Source, a local news site in a predominantly immigrant community with a goal of increasing civic engagement, we’ve found that connecting with residents in person is as important as producing original stories for the site. As an extension of that process — and to give feedback to participants in our young adult training program — we wanted to lead a forum in the languages of our community.

Easier said than done.

Speaking about sensitive issues such as inter-racial relationships or immigration is hard enough when the community speaks one language. When a quarter of the residents live in households where no adult speaks English well it is almost impossible.

In Alhambra — a city of 85,000 where there are more than four languages that a significant portion of the community speaks — the local schools cope by having automatic translation at meetings and translators on call most of the time.

For our event, we wanted immigrant residents not only to be able to receive information, but to actually have the opportunity for discussion. To do this, we collaborated with Asian Pacific American Legal Center, an advocacy organization that works with immigrant families and youth. Their organizers had experience doing both direct translation and small group discussions. They provided us with U.N.-style audio devices, gave us some guidance on leading the discussion, and mobilized many of the families they work with to come to the event.

The night of the forum we set up five tables in a local church with designated Spanish and Mandarin translators, a youth reporter and a moderator at each one.

Seventy people filled the room –- arriving early and catching us not quite ready. They were as diverse as the city itself: a police sergeant, teachers affiliated with Alhambra Latino Association, a local author, a Chinese blogger, students and stay-at-home moms. Each chose one of the five tables with a designated issue to discuss.

As an introduction, the young people shared a personal issue they had experienced coming of age in an immigrant community — navigating American-style relationships when your parents had an arranged marriage in India, suffering teasing as a recent immigrant from Cuba, and eating tamales at home while getting addicted to fries at school. The non-English speakers put on their headsets for the presentation, and two volunteers translated into Spanish and Mandarin.

Next, the youth reporters led the discussions about the issue they outlined at the five tables with the help of moderators and translators. And, almost miraculously, five simultaneous discussions emerged in multiple languages.

At one table Irma Uc, a part-time community college student, lead a sprawling discussion in four languages on school nutrition. A mother shared in Mandarin how her son had to take two physical education classes back to back because he could not speak English well. At the other end of the table, another mother shared in Spanish about how her kids did not like that Chinese foods were served in the schools.

“Once it started, it was a blur for me,” Irma recalled.

It was complicated, and sometimes the conversations sidetracked, but it was not Babel. People did exchange thoughts and experiences, the conversation flowing via translators into English, and in turn into Vietnamese, Spanish, and Mandarin.

“For some bizarre reason the conversation flowed easily,” Irma said. “The parents that were there really enjoyed the conversation and they also enjoyed listening in other people’s stories. And this is where the language barrier faded.”

When the event was over, we received one overwhelming criticism: The discussions were too short. Participants said the highlight was the opportunity to address common issues from different perspectives with neighbors with whom you could not usually communicate.

Here are a few more of the lessons we learned:

• Assess your translators’ skills.

  If you are going to do instantaneous translation, then make sure the translator is up to the task. Without pauses from the presenters, this can be extremely challenging, and nothing kills a discussion faster than not understanding. For group discussions, there is more leeway.

• Document the event.

  As a media outlet, the objective was not only to engage residents in conversation, but also to identify new issues and stories. Two L.A.-based media outlets that often hold forums, Zocalo and Southern California Public Radio, record events and post them on their sites. This works for a presentation with one microphone but is hard with the simultaneous smaller group discussions. We’re still looking for a way to document those exchanges, since they provided some of the most valuable elements of the evening.

• Provide food if you want busy parents to come.

  Our partners at Asian Pacific American Legal Center, who have a lot of experience with community organizing, made clear that if we want people to come, then there needed to be food – and it could not just be pizza.

• Provide child care if you want busy parents to come.

  We did not anticipate parents would bring children — or how distracting those rambunctious kids would be. If we did it again, we would have a designated babysitter.

• Partner with an organization with established relationships in the community.

  If you want people who do not speak English well to be part of your discussion, you have to have established relationships with them. Our site, while it contains multilingual content, is English dominant. We turned to local organizations to help make that connection — Asian Pacific American Legal Center was a great partner in our case. Another option is to work with local ethnic press and hold the forum in partnership.

• Control in-language conversations.

  If you have multiple languages, people will tend to go into side discussions by language, which is faster and easier than waiting for translation. You need a strong moderator to bring the conversation back to a central point, if you are truly going to have a multilingual discussion.

A version of this story appeared on Good.is.

Herman Cain, former Republican presidential nominee (Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)

Twitter’s rapid-fire capabilities and its character limitations often make for regrettable outbursts and narrow-minded generalities, especially when it comes to race in media and politics. Eric Deggans at Poynter suggests that the medium limits — maybe even distorts — the discussion of such topics, especially when tempers heat up.

In one Tweet, Tim Graham of Newsbusters.org and Media Research Center wrote, “MSNBC touting Karen Finney as another African-American host. Would the average viewer be able to guess that? Or is Boehner a shade more tan?” For Deggans, the comment smacked of an old school notion of diversity in the newsroom and “whether a media outlet will ‘get credit’ for a person of color who doesn’t resemble what some expect black and brown people to look like.”

In another Tweet, the deeply conservative musician Charlie Daniels wrote, “Funny how if you say something against Herman Cain you’re a genius If you say something against Barack Obama you’re a racist.” Deggans’ take was that the comment implies all black politicians are the same, regardless of political record.

The foot-in-mouth virus of Twitter is probably not surprising to many of its users, though. One commenter even responded:

“I understand your frustration at the reactions to your tweets, but that does not explain how Twitter was limited in this circumstance. The only thing I read is that you received a deluge of responses from Mr. Grahams followers. I have often seen this happen in comment sections to stories, so I don’t think it is something unique to twitter.”

The two men in charge. (Daniel Schwen/Wikimedia Commons)

James Goodale, the chief counsel to The New York Times when the paper published the Pentagon Papers, says that the Obama administration has been more restrictive of the First Amendment than any other president in history, even Richard Nixon. In his new book, Fighting for the Press, Goodale implores journalists to put pressure on Obama, who he believes gets a free pass a Republican president wouldn’t get from the press.

In a conversation with the Columbia Journalism Review, Goodale points to the administration’s use of the 1917 Espionage Act to sedate American journalism. “The biggest challenge to the press today is the threatened prosecution of WikiLeaks, and it’s absolutely frightening,” he said. During Obama’s two terms, the Espionage Act has been used to prosecute more alleged leakers than all former presidential offices combined.

Goodale said journalists don’t seem to consider this much of a problem. “They don’t believe it,” he told CJR. “I actually have talked to two investigative reporters who are household names, and I said, ‘Do you realize what’s happening to you if this goes forward?’ And I talk, I get no response, and the subject shifts to other parts of the book. No one seems to care.”