Preface The original Precision Journalism was written in the 1969-1970 academic year while I was the happy guest of the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City. It was updated only once, in 1978. The principles of social science research have not changed very much since then, but the technology has. And so this book is an attempt at a new start. It has a new title because 90 percent of the material is new. Only one chapter, the present chapter 6, has been retained in anything like the original form. A number of the original anecdotes and examples have been preserved, but the overall approach has been made kinder, gentler, and, I hope, more logical, informed by sixteen semesters of teaching this material to journalism students. The concept of precision journalism is, as often happens in social science, much older than the term itself. For a long time, those of us working with the concept struggled over what to call it. My involvement began in 1966-1967 when I used my Nieman year at Harvard University to study social science research methods. In the summer of 1967, I applied those methods to coverage of the Detroit riot for the Detroit Free Press. The Russell Sage grant followed. It was to produce a manuscript with the working title "The Application of Social and Behavioral Science Research Methods to the Practice of Journalism." A proper title had still not been found when the manuscript saw its first classroom use: Ted Frederickson and Herbert Strentz produced photocopies with my blessing for students at the University of North Dakota. In the winter of 1971, Everette E. Dennis took a leave from Kansas State University to teach a seminar on "The New Journalism" at the University of Oregon. He included what I had done in Detroit as an example of one rather exotic species of new journalism, and he called it "precision journalism" to contrast its scientific method with the artsy approach of those like Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin who used short-story techniques to illuminate nonfiction. I first heard the term at K-State from Dennis himself while we were strolling from the old part of Kedzie Hall to the new. Its earliest uses in print that I know about date from 1971. Neil Felgenhauer wrote a chapter on precision journalism in The Magic Writing Machine, a book produced by Dennis's seminar and published by the University of Oregon School of Journalism. In that same year, Michael 1 L. Johnson used the term in The New Journalism, published by the University Press of Kansas, in a footnote to describe the work of Ben Wattenburg. In 1972, when John Gallman of Indiana University Press broke my string of rejections and accepted the manuscript for publication, we decided that Dennis's descriptive term had the right ring, and so we adopted it. The choice proved to be correct. In the information age, an idea that won't fit in a sound bite or on a bumper sticker has a poor chance of survival. The current volume was made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professorship, which provided the funding for a leave of absence. Consulting assignments with USA Today and CBS News gave me the opportunity to test the ideas on real journalists. Portions of the manuscript were commented on by Carol Knopes, Shawn McIntosh, Jim Norman, Larry Sanders, Julia D. Wallace, G. Cleveland Wilhoit, and Frances Wilhoit. Gordon Black, Robert Hurd, Kathy Frankovic, and Warren Mitofsky helped me stay current on the art and science of election polling. The founders of the Carolina Poll, Richard Cole, Robert L. Stevenson, and Jane Brown, welcomed me into their midst in 1981 and kept my skills from getting rusty. Robert R. Berry, Pama, Mitchell and Timothy Rogers were energetic research assistants. Errors are, of course, my own, and if I didn't get it right this time, I'll try again. 2 Chapter 1 - Journalism and the Scientific Tradition 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. There was a time when all it took was a dedication to truth, plenty of energy, and some talent for writing. You still need those things, but they are no longer sufficient. The world has become so complicated, the growth of available information so explosive, that the journalist needs to be a filter as well as a transmitter, an organizer and interpreter as well as one who gathers and delivers facts. In addition to knowing how to get information into print or on the air, he or she also must know how to get it into the receiver's head. In short, a journalist has to be a database manager, a data processor, and a data analyst. It takes special training. In the good old days, there was serious doubt in professional circles about whether journalism, as a discipline, included any body of knowledge at all. Journalism, in this view, is all procedure, not substance.1 When James Bryant Conant had to deal with a windfall bequest to Harvard to “improve the standards of journalism,” he chose substantive training for mid-career journalists. “Mr. Conant felt that there was not a sufficient knowledge base to justify a journalism school . this conclusion led to a remarkably successful program which we have no desire to alter,” Harvard president Derek Bok recalled fifty years later.2 In a simpler world, journalism programs that ignored journalism might have been justified. In the information society, the needs are more complex. Read any of the popular journals of media criticism and you will find a long litany of repeated complaints about modern journalism. It misses important stories, is too dependent on press releases, is easily manipulated by politicians and special interests, and does not communicate what it does know in an effective manner. All of these complaints are justified. Their cause is not so much a lack of energy or talent or dedication to truth, as the critics sometimes imply, but a simple lag in the application of information science–a body of knowledge–to the daunting problems of reporting the news in a time of information overload. Harvard's Nieman program, which gives selected mid-career journalists an academic year to repair whatever educational gaps they perceive, is used by some to broaden their scope as generalists. But more and more are using it to adapt to the new demands by becoming more specialized. In a world where the amount of information is 1 doubling every five years,3 it takes a specialist to understand, let alone communicate, very much of it. The journalistic body of knowledge, therefore, must include these elements: 1. How to find information; 2. How to evaluate and analyze it; 3. How to communicate it in a way that will pierce the babble of information overload and reach the people who need and want it. To the extent that journalists learn how to do these things, they are meeting one of the elements of a profession: access to an esoteric body of knowledge. We are learning, and journalism is becoming more professionalized, but, as with any sweeping change, it is proceeding unsteadily and at different rates in different places. Where craft meets theory In journalism schools, the concept of precision journalism–the application of social and behavioral science research methods to the practice of journalism–found a ready market. The ready acceptance of this concept in academe was due in part to its contribution to the healing of the breach between the green eyeshade and chi-square factions. It demonstrated the applicability of social science research methods to the very real problems of newsgathering in an increasingly complex society. It produced work that both the researchers and the craft people could appreciate. The tools of sampling, computer analysis, and statistical inference increased the traditional power of the reporter without changing the nature of his or her mission–to find the facts, to understand them, and to explain them without wasting time. In the profession, however, the barriers were greater. Precision journalism threatened the twin traditions of journalistic passivity and journalistic innocence. The former tradition holds that media should report news, not make news. Media involvement in public opinion polling has been criticized on the ground that the media should not do polls but should wait passively until other people do them and then report on them.4 Media polls also violate the innocence rule. A reporter should be a person who casts a fresh eye on everything, something that he or she cannot do if burdened by too much specialized knowledge. A journalist, Vermont Royster told the 1967 class of Nieman 2 Fellows, should be “a professional amateur.” The extreme case is a foreign correspondent I once knew who laughed when I asked him if he was learning the language of the country to which he was assigned. In his view it was not necessary, might even be a hindrance. His readers did not know the language, and his job was merely to observe what they would observe if they were there and report on what he saw. If he learned a foreign language he might start to think like a foreigner and lose touch with those readers. The trouble with being a passive and innocent journalist is that, like any passive and innocent person, one can be too easily taken advantage of. The underlying theme in most modern criticism of journalism is that the media are too easily dominated by powerful politicians and their skillful “spin doctors” whose desires too easily determine what is defined as news and what is not.