Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Master's Theses Graduate School 2002 Is this journalism?: a study of whether the snapshots on the front page of USA Today adhere to journalistic standards Emily Arnette Vines Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.edu/gradschool_theses Part of the Mass Communication Commons Recommended Citation Vines, Emily Arnette, "Is this journalism?: a study of whether the snapshots on the front page of USA Today adhere to journalistic standards" (2002). LSU Master's Theses.edu/gradschool_theses/1244 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Master's Theses by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact gradetd@lsu.
IS THIS JOURNALISM?: A STUDY OF WHETHER THE SNAPSHOTS ON THE FRONT PAGE OF USA TODAY ADHERE TO JOURNALISTIC STANDARDS A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Mass Communication in The Manship School of Mass Communication by Emily Arnette Vines B., University of Florida, 1998 May 2002 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT. iii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION. 1 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW.1 History of Information Graphics.2 Function of Information Graphics .3 Problems with Information Graphics in Newspapers .4 Academics Outline Journalism Values .5 Journalist Outline Journalism Values .11 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH QUESTIONS & METHOD.1 Snapshot Production Procedures .3 Snapshots That Cite Gallup .52 ii ABSTRACT This thesis examined 22 Snapshots on the front-pages of USA Today from April 2001 to determine whether they adhered to the journalism standards of wholeness, accuracy, and credibility. Fourteen were found not whole, 8 were not accurate, and 3 were not credible according to the definitions of this thesis.
The researcher compared the data in the Snapshots to the data obtained from the cited source and interviewed sources as well as a news assistant and graphics editor at USA Today. The researcher found four possible explanations for the poor quality of the Snapshots and examined the routines of Snapshot production, which she then compared to those of traditional journalists. iii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION A graphic revolution occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries according to Daniel Boorstin.1 The telegraph, photograph, and television all gave rise to this revolution.2 Today, graphics are omnipresent. Driving down the interstate on the way to work, billboards call for your attention while a light in the shape of a gas pump reminds you to stop for fuel.
At the office, graphics make your computer’s desktop more interesting and files easier to find. This inundation of graphics often begins when the morning paper arrives and continues throughout the day; it is the graphics in the newspaper that this study will address. Newspapers are using graphics to bring more to the coverage of a story.3 In 1989, Sandra Utt and Steve Pasternack studied 161 daily newspapers with circulations greater than 25,000 and found that the majority of papers had been recently redesigned to include more color and graphics.4 A 1993 study found that 78.1 percent of the newspapers studied had information graphics on their front pages and almost half ran color information graphics every day.5 “Information graphics have become a regular and vital part of the way news is reported today,” write Utt and Pasternack.6 Today newspapers present information graphics as news. An information graphic presented in a journalistic context implies that the graphic is news and adheres to the same journalistic standards, or values, as the copy.
Information presented as news that does not adhere to news standards can mislead the reader. USA Today is recognized as a leader in information graphic presentation on news 7 pages. In 1987, USA Today had 13 graphic artists on staff that worked in shifts throughout the day and night to finish approximately 39 graphics an hour before the daily deadline.8 Large circulation, awards, and imitation by others reward USA Today for its use of color and graphics.9 The information graphic, or “Snapshot,” on the front page of USA Today exists beneath news briefs and alongside news articles. The Snapshot is part of the editorial content.
As one reads the front page, all of the information looks like news, but is it? Do the Snapshots adhere to journalistic values? In an article about “The Graphics Explosion,” Robert Hilliard writes that graphics have been accepted as a news vehicle, 1 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Random House, 1992), 119. 3 James Glen Stovall, Infographics: A Journalist’s Guide (Needham Heights, Mass. 4 Sandra Utt and Steve Pasternack, “How Do They Look: An Updated Study of America’s Newspaper Front Pages,” Journalism Quarterly 66, no.
Utt and Steve Pasternack, “Infographics Today: Using Qualitative Devices to Display Quantitative Information,” Newspaper Research Journal 14, nos. Baird, Duncan McDonald and Arthur T. Turnbull, The Graphics of Communication: Typography, Layout, Design, Production, 5th ed. 1 but reservations exist about the graphics director or editor acting as a judge of journalistic values.10 USA Today names the source of the information in the Snapshot below the graphic.
This source could be any institution from the United States Census Bureau to McDonald’s Corporation, which leads one to ask whether this Snapshot is a function of journalism or public relations. Information graphic research traditionally addresses issues of reader comprehension, reader recall, and attention-getting ability.11 This study will examine the relationship between information graphics and journalistic standards, specifically whether the Snapshots on the front pages of USA Today during April 2001 adhere to journalistic standards. The American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) established the first codes of journalism in 1923.12 These codes included responsibility, truthfulness, impartiality, and fairness.13 Until 1996, the Society of Professional Journalist’s (SPJ) Code of Ethics held objectivity as a core value. The SPJ then replaced objectivity with words like truth and accuracy.14 Recently the ASNE Journalism Values Institute (JVI) outlined journalistic standards.
These standards are balance/fairness/wholeness, accuracy/authenticity, leadership, accessibility, credibility, and judgment. The ASNE definitions will be the basis for understanding journalism values in this thesis. This thesis will primarily examine wholeness, accuracy, and credibility because they are hallmarks of journalism values and are able to be measured. The researcher also contacted USA Today and gave someone on the graphics staff and someone on the editorial staff the opportunity to respond.
The researcher asked the staff members questions about the wholeness, accuracy, and credibility of the Snapshots as well as questions about their production. The goal of this thesis is to study the Snapshots on the front page of USA Today during the month of April 2001 and determine whether they are whole, accurate, and credible through an analysis of the Snapshots’ images, comparison of the Snapshots to the original studies, and interviews with the Snapshots’ sources and staff members at USA Today. Then the researcher will offer four possible explanations for any deviations from these journalism values. Hilliard, “The Graphics Explosion: Questions Remain About Roles,” Journalism Quarterly 66, no.
11 Jyotika Ramaprasad, “Information Graphics in Newspapers: Attention, Information Retrieval, Understanding & Recall,” Newspaper Research Journal 12, no. Stevenson and Jeffrey L. Griffin, “The Influence of Statistical Graphics on Newspaper Reader Recall,” News Photographer 51, no. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the Press: The Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility and Soviet Communist Concepts of What the Press Should Be and Do (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1956), 85.
Mindich, Just the Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define American Journalism (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 5-6. 2 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW The following literature review will address the history and function of information graphics as well as the problems with presenting information graphics in newspapers. Then it will examine journalistic standards as academics and journalists have defined them. It will conclude with an examination of communication codes.1 History of Information Graphics Information graphics are “ the charts, graphs, diagrams, and pictographs used to relay statistical and other types of information through visual image.”1 Information graphics have existed since the time when caveman told stories through drawings on walls.2 Egyptians also used information graphics when they drew maps to chart the Nile River floods.
The history of information graphics would be incomplete, Stovall writes, without mentioning Leonardo da Vinci, who used graphics in his journal to explain his ideas when words would not suffice. And Rene’ Descartes, who lived during the first half of the 17th century, created the Cartesian grid, a system of horizontal and vertical lines that allowed him to plot points on a plane. This grid is the basis for many charts and graphs used today to plot statistical data. The most notable direct link to modern charts and graphs is from the work of Scottish-born writer and scientist William Playfair.
In 1786, he published a book titled The Commercial and Political Atlas, which had 44 charts, many of which plotted numerical information over time using line charts. Playfair also used a graph with horizontal bars to show import and export information. In a later book, Playfair created a graph out of a circle divided by lines radiating from the center. Playfair had created the line chart, bar chart, and pie chart that people so often use today.3 Playfair and Joseph Priestly, an English scientist and teacher, were the first to use time-line graphs, according to Peter Wildbur and Michael Burke.4 They also cite J.
Lambert, a Swiss-German mathematician, in the 18th century and Florence Nightingale in the 19th century as important pioneers in the development of information graphics.5 Nightingale used a polar-area diagram to present casualty numbers. This was the beginning of the belief that one could objectively measure, and present graphically, social phenomena.6 America witnessed a graphic revolution during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the advent of the rotary press, the high-speed press, photographs, motion pictures, and television.7 In the 1960s, American newspapers experienced a graphic revolution when newspapers began to use more legible type, reduce or eliminate headline decks, eliminate column rules, and balance the page with horizontal stories and pictures 1 Baird, 129-30. 4 Peter Wildbur, Michael Burke, Information Graphics: Innovative Solutions in Contemporary Design (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 12. 3 at the bottom of the page.8 Although graphics had existed for some time, journalists did not begin to use them until the 1960s and 1970s.
Maps were the most widely used graphic in newspapers until newspapers began using graphics to enhance the coverage of a story.9 “The revolution in newspaper design, which began almost 20 years ago, is continuing,” Sandra Utt and Steve Pasternack wrote in a 1984 analysis of newspaper front pages.10 “Overall, American daily newspaper front pages are more graphically pleasing today than ever before.”11 The study conducted by Utt and Pasternack in 1989 of 161 daily newspapers with circulations greater than 25,000 found that the majority of newspapers had recently redesigned their pages to include more color and graphics. 12 Another study of graphics in newspapers found an average of 31.56 graphics per newspaper and an average of 4.13 A 1993 study found that most of the sampled newspapers displayed information graphics on their front pages.14 The study also found that more than one-third of the newspapers ran more than an average of six information graphics every day and more than one-half ran an average of three to six. Ninety percent of the newspapers reported running more information graphics at the time than they did five years before the study.15 In 2000, a study of 125 newspapers found that almost half of the newspapers ran more than six information graphics on an average weekday. Three-quarters of the respondents said they ran more information graphics than they did five years before.16 The birth of USA Today in 1982 “legitimized the use of graphics in a way that revolutionized the newspaper industry.”17 USA Today used color and a weather map that covered half of a page.