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In the New Columbia Journalism Review: Online Journalism: Bonanza or Black Hole? How the Press Missed the Real Story On New Health Insurance Legislation What the Jerry Springer Affair Means to Local TV News Behind the PR Effort To Discredit Recovered Memories The Painful Aftermath of the San Jose Mercury News' Flawed CIA Series The July/August issue of CJR, the country's premier journal of press criticism and comment, was published by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism this week with the following stories and features: News on the Net "New media can transform journalism," states John V. Pavlik, executive director of the Center for New Media at Columbia's Journalism School, in one part of CJR's July/August cover package, "The Future of Online Journalism: Bonanza or Black Hole?" Counting himself among the optimists, Mr. Pavlik offers a Baedeker of the country's highest quality news web sites, where journalists are creating original content, adding links and interactive features and offering a degree of customization. A new stage of development is beginning to emerge, he writes, characterized by "immersive" storytelling, in which "you enter and navigate through a news report in ways different from just reading it." Mr. Pavlik advises editors and publishers that "a commitment to quality online news today is the best way to ensure that your news organization will be there when the online business matures a decade or more from now." In an accompanying article, "Show Me the Money!," Denise Caruso takes a more skeptical view and assesses "the wretched state of financial affairs for news organizations online." Ms. Caruso, on leave as the "Digital Commerce" columnist of The New York Times, says a marketing tactic called the FUD Factor (for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) caused news organizations to race to get online before it was "too late," though there was no realistic economic model for news websites. The subscription model has so far not worked, and advertising is unreliable at best as a revenue source, she writes. Online news leaders should step back, she advises, and ask themselves how they can give their customers online what they can't get any other way and whether they'll pay for it. Andie Tucher, associate editor of CJR, offers some further warnings in an article "Why Web Warriors Might Worry." Interactivity, considered the most distinctive contribution of online journalism, can make it easier to pander to audiences' news judgments. The hypertext link can send an unwary surfer from a respectable news site "straight through the looking glass" into parajournalism and pseudojournalism. And the traditional separation of editorial from advertising can blur in cyberspace, where new media staffers are often asked to design or produce ads, a task normally forbidden in the print realm. A Problem with Portability "Employees who think they can take their insurance to new jobs are in for a shock: they can't, despite what the media have told them," writes Trudy Lieberman, contributing editor of CJR, in the July/August issue. She has found that the major media, in stories and editorials, misled their readers and viewers when they tried to explain what would happen under the new Kennedy-Kassebaum Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which takes effect July 1. Her article is titled "You Can't Take It With You." The law makes it easier for workers who had group coverage to get new insurance without satisfying a waiting period because of a pre-existing condition, she notes. But only those with such conditions are affected. The press was too eager to embrace the symbol of portability. "Kennedy-Kassebaum doesn't do a lot of things the press said it would do, and does others - for example, it gives favors to doctors and insurers - that went almost entirely unnoticed," says Ms. Lieberman. "The media oversold the bill, misleading the public along the way. It inflated the number of people who would actually be helped by the measure, and almost never explained the complex procedures the law requires of people who try to get new policies - procedures that protect the insurance industry while making coverage hard to get for many who need it." The real story about Kennedy-Kassebaum, Ms. Lieberman cautions, is that it was "the kind of incremental health legislation Congress is likely to enact in coming years - highly technical, somewhat invisible, prone to overselling, and a repository for special favors for special interests." Springer in Chicago Television critic Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune analyzes that city's Jerry Springer affair, finding that it symbolized how the drift of local TV journalism into the sphere of entertainment is nearly complete. People woke from "their mute acceptance of that fact," he writes, when WMAQ-TV Chicago tried to boost ratings by bringing tabloid talk show host Springer onto the news set last spring to deliver commentaries on local issues. Two respected anchors quit on principle, ratings dropped, the station hired crisis managers and Springer resigned after two appearances. "How Low Can TV News Go?" Mr. Johnson asks in the July/August issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, and he comments: "In the current national climate of local television news, what happened at WMAQ was perhaps inevitable." Lost Memories In "U-Turn on Memory Lane," Mike Stanton, head of a reporting team at The Providence Journal-Bulletin, investigates the work of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which revolutionized the way the press and the public view what he calls "one of the angriest debates in America - whether an adult can suddenly remember long-forgotten childhood abuse." The article appears in the July/August issue of CJR. The foundation, formed originally as a support group for accused parents, has turned crusader and swung the pendulum of journalistic opinion against the idea that lost memory can be recovered. Pamela Freyd, the foundation's executive director, and her husband, Peter, have "encouraged accused parents to tell their stories to reporters and to appear on talk shows, to put a human face on this 'serious health crisis' and satisfy the media's 'craving for human drama,'" writes Mr. Stanton. The foundation became an overnight media darling, he notes, but the reporters who rushed to explore the new angle ignored essential facts: that "there is no way to document the prevalence of bad therapy versus good therapy, or of true memories versus false memories, and that it is nearly impossible to know whether the accused parents, the Freyds included, are telling the truth." Mr. Stanton cites stories in a variety of major media that supported the Freyds' contentions and cautions reporters to "resist the temptation to think you can solve the mystery of memory." "This is a story with many voices beyond the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. All of them need to be heard." How the Mercury News Told It "Soul Searching in San Jose" in the July/August issue of CJR explores the lessons editors and journalists can learn from the flawed "Dark Alliance" series at the San Jose Mercury News, an investigative report that the paper confessed later "did not meet our standards." (The article follows CJR's review of that series in the November/December 1996 issue.) The three-part report split the newsroom and changed the newspaper's editorial process, reports CJR author Pia Hinckle, a 1996-97 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism and former managing editor of The San Francisco Bay Guardian. The series by Gary Webb said that a Bay Area drug ring had opened a pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and had funneled drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the CIA. The series, which ran last August, was criticized by other newspapers for alleged inaccuracies. Although Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos defended it vigorously, he printed a mea culpa this May after months of study, acknowledging incomplete interpretations, oversimplifications and language and graphics that were open to misinterpretation. Ms. Hinckle explores the unusual series of editings that reporter Webb's stories passed through and the situations and skills of the editors he worked with to understand better the pressures under which the newspaper tried to first stand by and then distance itself from the series. 6.26.97 19,160