crazy but chemistry, something like this. and that one person then pursues it. it requires a spirit of entrepreneurship. entrepreneurship, is more important than a high iq. that person then gathers stars together people, collaborators, one here who can do the mathematical model, another one there that can do natural products in chemistry, another one there who knows how to design the right computer programs. and before long you have a group, but that's not the group that innovates. you know, has dream, one person. you're right, and that's not going to disappear at all. this is the first time i've had a meeting like this and nobody ever asked me a question about

answers. [laughter] >> one last question. >> police. >> was leo right or wrong when he said 95 finish last? >> nice guys finish last. not at all, i don't think. it's the nice guy who may, in fact, may be the one who's having a great idea. or who gets enough cooperators around him or her to form a coalition, a starch, a political movement, or is, knows how to run a company at a time when goodwill in partnership among the key employees is all important. that's the new trend in business

management. >> why don't you join me in thanking -- [applause] >> thank you all for coming. good night. [inaudible conversations] >> all this week turn to c-span for live gavel to gavel coverage of the democratic national convention in charlotte, north carolina. this evening see speeches from massachusetts senate candidate elizabeth warren and former president bill clinton. watch every minute, every speech over on c-span. it on c-span2, it's booktv all day everyday throughout the convention with highlights of

the nonfiction authors and books. and on c-span3, also throughout the convention, 24 hours of american history tv with lectures, oral histories and you look at historical american sites and artifacts. >> next on booktv, boston university journalism professor christopher daly discusses the evolution of journalism from the 1700s to the digital age. in his book, "covering america," he examines the current arguments that journalism is in danger and points to the numerous obstacles that the news industry has faced throughout its history. this is a little under an hour. >> welcome everybody. and please take your seat. i'm nicholas lemann, the dean of

the journalism school. this is to celebrate the publication of a book of "covering america" which is a history of american journalism. certain it will soon be if it isn't already a standard history of american journalism for many years to come by this gentleman, christopher daly, who is a professor of journalism at boston university and an old friend of mine. to give you some idea of how far back we go, when i knew chris, there was a lot of hair here and down here. so anyway, here's what we're going to do. we have a fairly intimate gathering so i want to have time for a lot of q&a so i will spend about the first 30 minutes of this event doing sort of interrogating him about the book. and then we'll go interacted with the audience or another 20 minutes or so, and then we have free food and wine in the back,

which everyone will enjoy for a while. >> thank you, nic. >> okay, as journalists were always taught to look for the local angle, so before we go to the grand themes of your book, which is going to do that. tell us about this guy, pulitzer, who founded the school. >> well, pulitzer is a fascinating character and a great place to start, because he was one of the people at probably one of the greatest impacts on the field. as some of you may know, he came to this country under very trying circumstances. he came as a recruit to the union army in the middle of the civil war. the army was at that point so desperate for new recruits that

they were taking just about anybody, and they took this very unpromising soldier with poor eyesight, but he managed to get through, survived the civil war and found himself after the war in a german-speaking part of the country in st. louis. and through a combination of tremendous effort, energy, luck and happy circumstances he ended up a part owner of a newspaper in st. louis your parlay that into the ownership of a fading newspaper here in new york city, and started remaking the world of journalism by his tremendous willingness to experiment. to lecture would try almost anything in order to break through to the mass circulation that he was seeking. so in short order he started throwing things into his

newspaper, like comics. is one of the first to publish regular sunday comics, famously had a comic called hogan's alley which featured a little urchin wearing a yellow nightshirt, the origin of the phrase yellow journalism. and pulitzer kept experimenting. in, i think one of the things he deserves credit for his discovering women. not to say that they have been lost or anything, but pulitzer was working very hard to commercialize his newspaper, to make it a financial success and worked very close with advertisers. what they figured out together was that many of the purchasing decisions in the household are made by women. what should the children where? what soap should we use? what kind of sheets shall we buy? and these were the very things that new york manufacturers and

retailers wanted to publicize, and so pulitzer was thinking well, how can i connect to these rimmon -- women readers with these retailers? and came upon a very good answer, which was maybe i should hire some women. as we know, started hiring some of the earliest full-time professional journalists. so pulitzer put his stamp on lots of different things, and, of course, we're sitting in a building that we go to his legacy. >> yeah, in fact i don't know if you notice, but we just announced a little historical detour, so pulitzer made all this money, mustard by surprise, journalism, at the time it was not widely known that journalism even was a commercial thing to do in life.

and he come in about the early 1890s he had an idea of starting a school of journalism and the university and came to columbia and started pitching them. and columbia turned him down, starting the school of journalism. he was very persistent so we took basically 10 years to get columbia to take his money. and he said -- set up the pulitzer prizes and the school. and the gift agreement says the school shall be in a newly constructed building in the building shall bear the name of the donor. pulitzer died in 1911. the building opened, the school opened in 1912 which is celebrating our centennial, holding open in 1913 and lo and behold it bore the name journalism. it was that journalism -- various speculation about why that was. so we just rectify that. you saw the big scaffold outside. these are guys carping is to pulitzer's name above our

doorway. and as of april 20, we will be named the pulitzer building final. >> well, it's about time. overdue, great. >> there's so many pieces of the book to talk about that we are just going to scratch the surface, but i don't know if anybody here has seen the newseum in washington, d.c. which is a monument -- have enough resources to build like that, and it has this stone tablet in front, about three stories high that kind of makes the 10 commandments look like an ask risk or an afterthought with the first amendment carved in it. so, the founders, what did they have in mind when the roast -- wrote the first amendment?

what was journalism been? what were they alluding to? >> very important question, and i think it has a lot of bearing on what's going on today in journalism. if we look at the 18th century, journalism started off this country in 1704 as a very puny and unimpressive kind of enterprise. the very first newspapers were very small, had circulations in the dozens, and then maybe the low one hundreds. and they were really intimidated by the other institutions in that society, especially church and state. and compared to them, these newspapers were not at all important. and very much under their thumbs. but what you see over the course of the next couple of decades is a process by which those newspapers become increasingly political in what they focus on, and they get to be bolder and bolder, for reasons i go into in the book.

so by the 1760s and certainly by 1770, they are in full throat expressing themselves on all kind of political issues of the day. on independence from britain or reconciliation with the mother country. if we break, what kind of government should we have? all these huge questions. and the press becomes quite polemical during this period. it's often the products that people are reading are often produced anonymously or stood anonymously by people who don't want to be known. as political partisans. and that's the nature of the press that the founders were familiar with. that press was very local. it was small-scale. it was very political. most of those newspapers had very little what we would think of as original reporting.

nonfiction material, the staff that generated. that was not really in the cards. so as we see a return to a more polemical style today in journalism, it's not something that is unanticipated or it doesn't fit into this constitutional scheme. >> who invented reporters? because we tend to think of reporters and journalists as synonyms but that was not -- >> not at all, no, no, no. it really wasn't until about the 1830s, begin here in new york city, another really inventive journalist named benjamin day, created the first so-called penny press newspaper, sold for a penny a copy. so he was going way down market trying to reach the broadest possible audience. and to be that he needed to fill

it up with surprising, amazing things every day. fires, news from the police stations, and dockings of ships, anything like that that he could find. and he wore himself out trying to fill the paper. and so he hired the first full-time reporter, a man named george wisner, regrettably obscure figure in american journalism is about going to try to do something about that. speak at when did journalism become a business? that is, if you did you're describing in the colonial period, it doesn't sound like, how did it support itself in? >> well, most of those newspapers were created by people who were really in another trade. that is, they were printers. and in order to keep their print shop busy and in order to bring their customers into the shop to pick up their papers, so that

they could sell them some stationary on the site or seldom a book while they were in there, they hit upon the idea of a newspaper as a perfect device. it expires every week, and later every day once the pace picked up. and so most of those first enterprises were a sideline of someone who really we would think of as a job printer. that is, so it was open to pretty all kinds of stuff from anybody who had business. and then it's really around the revolutionary period, certainly the early federal period where you see that sideline disappears and the newspaper itself becomes the real focus. first daily paper in the country is founded in 1783. and once the cityscape to be a certain density and there's enough commerce, enough population, then in the early part of the 19th century they get going and they really take off in the 1830s.

>> so that's when it's fair to say for the first time that journalism is a business? >> oh, yes. it's clear by then. >> now, as much as people make fun of us, so i have to ask -- >> more power to you. >> when did the notion of journalism as a professional come on the scene in? >> that is still contested terrain, in the since -- >> you and i both remember we're going into journalism, we are upset by college kids were going into journalism. >> yes, and you still here today once in a while, you know, if you find the right kind of a person, you can get a barroom stool argument going over the necessity of journalism instruction. in fact that apprentice model that you and i came across when

we were starting out, has really been thrown overboard because no one, almost no one in the news business any longer can afford to have someone on the payroll just while the getting instructed and learning the ropes. so a lot of that training role of newspapers and news oriented magazines and such has been exported and taken out of the newsroom. the only other institution that could pick that up are the schools of journalism. >> so the notion of the journalist, sort of come in his own mind, exalted figure in society, to put it as someone practicing a trade or craft, when did you first encounter in? >> well, i was a mr. gellert had a role in the. he'd made a very forceful argument in a series of articles he wrote in the late 1890s about the necessity and the

urgency really of training journalists. because society was becoming more complicated, and the need was there for people who could understand the bigger government, the more complicated corporations, the whole changing scene. he describes it as the journalist being somewhat comparable to the saver -- >> [inaudible] >> wright, who keeps an eye out for the shifting weather and the dangers that face society. and i think there's also debate about whether journalists need to go to school to learn other things, and maybe learn economics or how to read chinese, or something specific like that. or do they need instruction in the mistress of our trade. >> if you could, talk a little

bit the role of government in journalism, the conventional wisdom is the role of government in journalism is stay away, per the first amendment. is a useful to think about government as a direct or indirect subsidized, regulator of journalism in the past, now, maybe in the future speak with that's a complicated and shifting relationship. what i found, by looking at a topic over 300 years some of these things start to reveal themselves in a way that a tiny slice wouldn't. so i see a period in the early years where government was very helpful to those early newspapers. just to take one example, right after the post office was organized, the congress of the united states authorize the post office to allow newspapers to exchange one copy with each other newspaper, for free.

that would be carried at no cost through the postal service, which allowed editors to swap and actually like borrow and lifted from each other. it was a great way of filling up your newspaper for free in the early days. also in the 18th century and early 19 center a lot of state government and the federal government did not have their own printing capacity. so everything that they needed printed had to be chopped out to a printer. this is one of the ways they kept a lot of those early newspapers afloat, the printer who is on the side of the party of power would get those contracts and would be the one who was authorized to print everything, early currencies, lottery tickets, detections of laws, all of these things would be given as a political favor to the editor who was on the right side. >> so today, just a circuit to the present before it could work

questions, there is a mood, it varies from day to day i suppose. some days it's panic, some days it's excitement, but there is generally a feeling that, you know, everything in journalism is changing very rapidly, very significantly. this whole conversation takes place about 90% without any historical perspective at all. you have historical perspective. what is your view on what we're seeing right now happening in journalism? >> well, as i describe in my book, in the final chapter about going digital, i think what we are seeing now is the latest in a series of recurring, almost predictable crises in american journalism. is one of these times when the business model gets out of whack with the prevailing philosophy of journalism, and we're going through a period of

readjustment. i personally think this is a great time for american journalism. i didn't think that when i first started writing this book. it took me ages to write it, and at the beginning i was thinking oh, you know, i'm going to end up writing the obituary of american journalism, because it seemed to be falling apart right in front of my eyes. now though i think what we are seeing is a rebirth of much smaller, more independent, more sometimes partisan journalism, and i think we are seeing, thanks to the digital world, almost complete collapse of what economists would call the barriers to entry, into our field. so you today, just for comparison, in the 1980s with the launch of "usa today," it's estimated that that and a prize lost about a billion dollars before it make any money. so the startup cost and the years of losses, a billion

dollars, that was probably the all time high water mark for the cost of launching a journalistic enterprise. you know, today some of your students could probably get a news website going by friday, and he'll be posting -- >> and they do. >> so the cost of getting into the business, has gone almost to the vanishing point. and i would almost a our tools i've never been better. the kinds of things that journalists can do today with a small backpack full of equipment and some extra batteries, you know, it's almost unlimited the kind of multimedia productions they can do, things that when you and i were starting out you need a truckload of equipment and specialist. you would have needed the disney studio to show to produce the things that our students do all the time spent how is going to get supported economically? or will be more like the colonial period? >> it's unclear. and one of things, i took with

my book, it's not natural and certainly not inevitable that journalism be housed within big corporations. i think we can now see that was an historical period as it is now changing, but it was easy in the 20th century to think this was a natural state of things. now i'm not so sure. >> two things just don't want to get your reaction to that i he hear, have panel discussions on journalism. so one, imagine yourself at the jewish community center on the upper west side, and the audience is why can't they make the internet go away? there's all this misinformation out there, and there's nothing to combat it. and oh, for the days of walter cronkite, and only limited number of sort of very austere

news voices. do you share that view? and how are we supposed, how would you respond to people who say, yikes, anybody can say anything, and people are being misled? >> well, i certainly recognize that point of you and it is a common complaint. you know, where is the authority of the mainstream media, what has happened to the state institutions? well, you know, i think as a historian i have a certain amount of equanimity when i look at this because i think, you know, we are trained in history to always ask, well, when were the good old days and what was so fabulous about them? we have very limited access to information, and it was all one way. it was not a conversation. it was a nightly lecture. and they were not always right. that's another thing to keep in

mind. i think there are better corrective mechanisms today thanks to the internet and then they were during the glory days. i think all these things involve trade-offs. there were some great things about the middle and late 20th century, and some things that honestly we won't miss. >> now let me give you the offer to set kind of question. can you imagine the mountain view, california, and people, so he raised a hand in the audience and said why do we need journalists at all? can you explain that? as long as you have good rules for publicly available data and good search algorithms and crowd sourcing, to me, let's just eliminate the middleman, and how do you respond to that? >> well, that is a view that is also very popular. in fact, a lot of my students feel that way.

at boston university where i teach, our dean has made arrangements with newspapers to have stacks of newspapers in our lobby every day. you know, dozens are stacked up there. at the end of the day that generous, and take them away. no students will even stoop to pick one up. it's just an impediment. [talking over each other] >> well, so what i would think is that while the internet gives people tremendous ability to search and to be more active seekers of information and blunders, i think they're still really important job for the storyteller to bring material together in a way that no one would find on their own. i mean, i was just looking at one thing the other day, fantastic project by the national film board in canada about a grizzly bear, a

fantastic story, rich and multilayered kinds of technolo technology, fascinating story. but a story that will not tell itself. someone has to have the idea, someone has to make that happen. stories don't just tell itself. and i think story rather than data is something that i think there will always be tremendous interest in. >> i want to switch to audience in a second, but just out of curiosity, usually when you work on a book for as long as you worked on this book, you encounter somebody that you didn't even know about before, catches your interest and perhaps affection and perhaps hatred. i'm curious, who's in this book that you didn't know existed before, when you started the book? just a couple of examples. >> there's quite a few actually. i was surprised as i did my research, and i think i'm

typical of a lot of journalists in this and that i hadn't had much schooling in this, in the history of journalism. so i was surprised to discover, for instance, a journalist named lawrence go bright, fantastic me to work for "the associated press" in its early years. and he had the incredibly challenging job of covering washington for "the associated press," also the 1850s and 1860s. so he's in a predicament where he has to go cover congress and the courts and everything, and write a story that will be acceptable to the editors of all different political outlooks. so some of those editors are strong with and become strong republicans. others are strong democrats. some of them are copperheads. there's a lot. and they all have to be willing toep