Wilbur Schramm

The Nature of News

~ NEWS EXISTS IN THE MINDS OF men. It is not an event; it is something perceived after the event. It is not identical with the event; it is an attempt to reconstruct the essential framework of the event-essential being defined against a frame of reference which is calculated to make the event meaningful to the reader. It is an aspect of communication, and has the familiar characteristics of that process. The first news report of an event is put together from a gestalt of eyewitness accounts, secondhand accounts, tertiary comments and explanations, and :the reporters own knowledge and predispositions. The report is then coded for transmission, usually by persons who have had no connection with the actual event. It is coded by modifying its length, form, emphasis, and interpretation, to meet the mechanical demands of transmission and presentation, the anticipated needs and preferences of the audience, and the somewhat better known wishes and demands of the buyers of the news. Then the news is trusted to ink or sound waves or light waves, and ultimately comes to an audience, where it competes with the rest of the environment for favor. A typical member of the audience selects from the mass of news offered him perhaps one-fourth of the news in a daily paper, perhaps one-half of the items in a newscast he happens to hear. These items of news are perceived by each individual as a part of another gestalthis environment and its competing stimuli, the state of his organism at the moment, and his stored information and attitudes. Perception completed, symbol formed, the news then goes into storage with a cluster of related bits of information and attitudes, and becomes the basis for attitude change and action. No aspect of communication is so impressive as the enormous number of choices and discards which have to be made between the formation of the symbol in the mind of the communicator and the appearance of a related symbol in the mind of the receiver. This selection occurs in every step of the process, but communication by mass media aggravates in a peculiar manner the problem of selection by the audience. The typical American adult

The Weekly Newspaper and Its Readers

Twenty-four surveys of weekly newspaper reading provide the basis for the generalizations advanced in this article about the place of the weekly in its community. Dr. Schramm is research professor of journalism and dean of the Division of Communications at Illinois, where Mr. Ludwig is research assistant.

The Effects of Mass Communications: A Review:

On the basis of two significant new books, the Director of the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois formulates a set of hypotheses that reflect the present state of research in this field. Dr. Schramm is also chairman of the AASDJ Council on Research.

What Radio News Means to Middleville

BEHIND the Hooper ratinp, behind the CAB levels, are· perSODS and communities. E~ry 80 often we ba.e· to remind oune1ft8 that a program is not heard by 6.8, but rather by Samuel Jones and other individuals in commtmities. They listen to it onder different conditions and in diJlerent ways; in each of them it arouses different responses. If we knew and could comprehend those facts about audieace response, we should haYe priceless information about radio. In an effort to get behind some of those program ratings into the patterns of radio news listening, the Iowa School of Journalism has just completed one of a series of intensive studies of typical communities. This is a report of that study. Middleville. The village we shall call Middleville is in east central Iowa, in the midst of the richest farm land in the world. In most respects it is typical of the villages of the northern fertile plaine. The 1940 census gives it 542 persons, but there were only 510 when this study was made; some had gone away to the armed services or to war plante, and a few were vacatiODing in sun-

Flight from Communism: A Report on Korean Refugees

IN November, I950, the Human Resources Rethrows light on both North and South Korean search Institute, Air University, under the direactions to communism, the group collected rection of Dr. Raymond V. Bowers, organized other systematic data on the Sovietization of and sent several teams of social scientists to Korea. the Far East to study certain human factor John W. Riley is Professor of Sociology at problems in connection with the war in KoRutgers University; Wilbur Schramm is Dean rea. The psychological warfare team was corof the Division of Communications at the Uniposed of the authors of the present article, versity of Illinois; and Frederick W. Williams Dr. John C. Pelzel of Harvard University, and is Chief, Psychological Warfare Division, HuMajor C. N. Weems. man Resources Research Institute; respectively. In addition to the following report, which

Reading and Listening Patterns of American University Students

F CI S Parkman put about an hour a day, at Harvard during the winter of 1844-1845, on class work. The rest was free for recreation and reading. He read books. Newspapers almost never entered his dormitory; magazines seldom. There were no moving pictures on Harvard Square, no radios in the Yard. But in Parkmans room, as he said in a letter of December, 1844, were a sea-coral fire--a dressinggown slippers a favorite author. 1 We know in a general way what has happened to college reading and listening since then. The extra-curricular reading of books has fallen off sharply, radio and moving pictures have come powerfully into the pattern, magazines and newspapers have been made far more readily obtainable. In search of precise basic data on the present impact of mass communication media on college students, a study was made at the University of Iowa during the last months of 1944 and the first weeks

Manpower Needs in Radio News: AATJ and NAB Survey Results

B ROADCASTING stations in this country think they will need as many as 500 additional news writers and editors during the com› ing year. About one-third of the sta› tions will not employ women for this purpose, and more than two-thirds will not employ women for reading news over the air. At the present time about 1700 news editors and writers are employed in American stations. These are the implications of a survey conducted during July and A ugust by the committee on radio of the American Association of Teachers of Journalism, with the c0› operation of the National Associa› tion of Broadcasters. A postcard questionnaire was sent to the 577 member stations of the NAB. Replies came from 817 sta› tions--55 per cent of the NAB mem› bership, 38 per cent of all the broad› casting stations in the, United States. Of the six questions asked, two were answered in such a way as to indicate that they were mis› interpreted by an unknown number of station managers, and the ques› tions are therefore not reported up› on here. The other four and their answers follow: 1. How many PeT~ona does yOUT newsroom e’TTtploy to ’lUTite and/or edit news for b-rorodcast (in ternuJ of full-time employees) ? The 817 stations answering this question replied that they employed 634 persons. The table below shows the breakdown by size of stations. When these totals are projected 1 for all stations in the country, with allowanCe for variation by size of station, the indication is that about 1700 full-time news writers and edi› tors are now employed. ~. Would you em,ploy qualified women for news editing and/or writing? About 83 per cent of the ~98 sta› tions answering this question said they would not employ women for these purposes. Another 7 per cent said they were doubtful. A version to use of women appears to be inverse› ly proportional to size of station, as this breakdown shows:

Ithiel de Sola Pool, 1917–1984

ITHIEL DE SOLA POOL died on March 11, 1984, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after a long battle with cancer. In some ways his last months were the most remarkable part of a remarkable career. His illness was diagnosed in 1980. During his remaining time he wrote 45 papers, 20 of them in 1983 alone. In 1983 he completed three books, the most recent of which, Technologies of Freedom, may well prove to be his best. He continued to respond to invitations to meetings and conferences and to a constant flow of requests from students and colleagues for advice and encouragement. Even in the hospital he took calls and answered correspondence. On the last evening of his life he asked that his working papers and his reading papers be laid beside his bed so that he could work with them if he awakened during the night. He was born in New York, the son of a distinguished rabbi. He took three degrees from the University of Chicago: a B.A. in 1938, an M.A. in 1939, and a Ph.D. (delayed by the dissertation) in 1952. Those were some of Chicagos greatest years. He was a member of the first seminar taught by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. Herbert Simon, the Nobel laureate, was one of his classmates. The influence of Harold Lasswell hung over him at Chicago and for some decades thereafter. Lasswell gave him his first major research job, assisting with the Radir project at Stanford, in which changing elites and symbols were studied from 1880 to 1940 in the hope of finding a path of change that might be projected into the future. On Lasswells recommendation he went to M.I.T. in 1953 to join Max Millikans Center for International Studies as head of the International Communication Program. Later he was instrumental in founding the Department of Political Science, of which he became first chairman. He also headed the M.I.T. Interdisciplinary Program in Communication Policy. Ithiel was a strong man, firm of mind, quick and sharp of intellect,

Report of the AEJ Committee on Liaison with UNESCO

As a sequel to the UNESCO proposal for an International Press Institute, reported in the Quarterly for March 1948, two private institutes now have come into being. These and other developments are discussed in this report and the report of the Committee on Foreign Schools and Students, which follows.

Book Review: From Cave Painting to Comic StripFROM CAVE PAINTING TO COMIC STRIP. By LancelotHogben. New York: Chanticleer Press. 1949, 286 pp. Ill.

~ RIGHT AFTER PEARL HARBOR, JOURnalism joined up for the duration, and we had scores if not hundreds of regimental, divisional and camp papers, and even the large papers such as Yank and Stars and Stripes. It all proved we had a reading army. The printed and written word was one of the principal weapons in the fight against boredom and homesickness. It was a key factor in keeping up the morale of the serviceman no matter where he -rnight befrom Boston to Bombay, from Attu to Antwerp. Papers, books, magazines and letters were a mighty quadrumvirate in beating down the forces of ennui. The late Ernie Pyle used to write in his daily dispatches of how the men in uniform loved to read in order to get their minds off their problems and surroundings. Mr: Jamieson here, has given us a readable, fascinating account of the Army Library Service, from first to last. It is not, written in the heavy or pedantic style in which literature about books and reading too often is garbed. The pages are constantly livened with anecdotes and illustrations drawn from all parts of the globe dealing with books and their distrioution. We learn, for example, that during 1 the war years some 25 million hardhound and zoo million p~erbound books were purchased or do ated for distribution to soldiers all over the world. These figures become more meaningful when we pause to remember that the Library of Congress only has five million books on its shelves. Approximately 1,200 civilian librarians served for a year or more m army Iibraries in the United States and overseas during the war years. This volume has numerous references to newspapers and the Fourth Estate generally, and a great deal about magazines, scattered through its pages. It has chapters on such topics as: Book Distribution in the Pacific Theaters, Armed Services Editions, The European Theater, Censorship and the Soldier Voting Law, and The Western Pacific. Some 275 pages comprise text-material for 18 chapters, and 60 pages for appendix, notes and index. Every reporter or newspaperman would enjoy reading this book, and if saw service himself, whether at home or overseas, it would bring back a flood of memories. We can only wish that Mr. Jamieson had somehow managed to include a chapter or two on books in other branches of the service, such as the Navy and Marine Corps. The author studied at Johns Hopkins University, was drafted early in the war, and rose through the ranks in the Army Library Service from G I library assistant .at an Army post to become one of the principal assistants to the Chief of the Library Section, U. S. Army. Mr. Jamieson is now editor of general publications for the H. W. Wilson Company. CEDRIC LARSON New York City