Digital journalism is a comeback of “yellow papers” – and, finally, the death of sterile, conservative and cowardly newspapers (PHOTO GALLERY)

On September 20th, 2009, President Obama offered his opinion on contemporary news media – specifically, and curiously, on their workflow. “Cable news and blogs, operating on a 24-hour news cycle, focus on the most extreme elements on both sides. They can’t get enough of the conflict,” the president stated.

This environment, continued Obama, makes “it more difficult for us to solve problems.” The alleged rise of a 24-hour news cycle is one of the most repeated, and most banal, observations about the changing media landscape. In fact, the 24-hour news cycle was rocking hard more than one hundred years ago.

In 1890s, daily newspapers – which decades earlier were known to be morbidly slow – were non-stop news operations, with numerous daily editions and a phenomenal ability to quickly get their news on the streets. Canadian editor Kenneth Whyte spent months researching New York newspapers of the era, as well as trade publications dealing with media.

“At times there were more than forty daily editions of a newspaper. It took about 10 minutes from receiving the article from a reporter to selling the fresh issue on the streets of New York,” writes Whyte.

In addition, he discovered that publications such as New York Journal, New York World and New York Sun operated gigantic billboards during elections or sporting events, to provide a live stream to the gathered citizens. An earlier, more primitive version of a 24-hour news cycle existed at the turn of last century.

Yet, fifty years later, newspapers had cut down to, at best, a morning, afternoon and evening edition. The incredible speed of producing and distributing the paper vanished as well. The 24-hour workflow finally re-appeared in the past few decades, on TV and online, but print newspapers never quite recovered their sense of urgency.

The numerous daily editions of 1890s, when the constant workflow was at its most vigorous before its modern-day re-appearance, was merely the most material manifestation of a broader philosophy these newspapers followed.

It was all about the the reader – the rich style of writing, noted novelists and artists as regular collaborators, attention-grabbing headlines, avant-garde usage of illustration and photography, introduction of weekly supplements such as comics, speed and distribution efficiency, editions around the clock – every aspect of the 1890s newspaper operation was designed to put the reader in the center of attention.

Even a quick glance at all U.S. dailies today shows this is no longer the case. Bland typography, lack of quality graphics and a sterile writing style, which Schudson identifies and attributes to the fetish of objectivity, dominate the landscape.

Homogeneous tendencies in newspaper structure, names of sections and headlining style would make a Martian wonder whether they were all owned by a big monstrous monopoly, reluctant to experiment or embrace any progress.

When was the last time a daily newspaper gave birth to, or at least published articles by, a Mark Twain or a Stephen Crane – regular nonfiction newspaper contributors in 1890s. Shockingly, New York papers produced more than a century ago even had more full-color pages than most contemporary U.S. papers today.

When it comes to their overall philosophy and connection with the user, the 1890s newspaper are much closer to today’s blogs, podcasts, mashups and interactive graphics – in other words, to digital journalism.

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Every blogger or Twitter user appreciates the importance of an audience. Big newspapers in most U.S. cities have taken their audiences for granted – for years. Real circulation wars have not happened for decades in New York, for example.

Now, yesterday’s passive readers have the platforms and skills to become active content producers. As they increasingly do, millions of these individual producers begin to appreciate the value of someone actually reading what you have to say. Anyone can tweet or blog.

But how do you get noticed in the maelstrom of producers? We’ve thus come up with the whole science – and business – of search engine optimization. We make sure our posts have tags and keywords, and our hyperlinks are properly structured. We also make headline as interesting and fresh as possible, so when they show up on our Twitter, someone might actually click on them.

More than a hundred years ago, Joseph Pulitzer defined the blogger’s struggle: “If a newspaper is to be of real service to the public, it must have a big circulation. Its news and comments must reach the largest possible number of people.”

Wordpress blogs, Flickr accounts or YouTube channels are great venues for creating and sharing content. If our ambition is simply to have an online personal diary or a dump for family photos, it is more than enough to open one of these and start posting.

If, however, we would like to influence the public debate – to be of real service to the public – then attracting readers and building an audience is a must. Pulitzer’s newsboys, running around the city and yelling out his headlines, were simply the ancient version of SEO.

So was the 1890s style of headlining. “We don’t use unclear headlines that mask what the story is about. We try to attract the readers to actually stop and read it,” wrote Morril Goddard, the Sunday Editor of Hearst’s newspaper, the New York Journal.

In the extremely vibrant New York market, with dozens of competitive dailies, Goddard understood the importance of encouraging readers to pick up his newspaper. “We use the big headline and the editorial and the picture to attract people’s attention, get hold of their minds, and stimulate them to think,” said Hearst.

Like today, the late 19th century commitment to building a readership also had commercial connotations. Pulitzer used to say that “circulation means advertising, and advertising means money, and money means independence.”

In the same fashion, the number of clicks and unique visitors on one’s blog could mean a substantial source of income. You could install Google’s AdSense and monetize your readership – an additional incentive to add the tags, improve the writing and come up with appealing headlines.

Contrast that with print newspapers, which enjoyed incredible profit margins and hadn’t had to build an audience in this fashion for decades.

Most headlines, sub-headlines and captions thus play it safe, either by using ambiguous, cliched phrases – “Common Ground” being one of the more popular ones – or the most sterile headline possible, “In Afghanistan, A Range Of Options”, a recent one on the cover of the New York Times. A blog with this headline would have difficulties building a meaningful audience.

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These SEO and reader-friendly techniques extend beyond headlines and captions. Hearst said that “if you don’t hit a newspaper reader between the eyes with your first sentence, there is no need of writing a second one.” In a comprehensive 1997 study, Kevin Barnhurst and Diana Mutz note a radical move away from descriptive, on-the-spot reportage towards interpretive, analytical pieces.

At first, this sounds like a welcome change. But the problem, as Barnhurst and Mutz explain, is that on-the-spot reportage, still found in many magazines today, puts the reader in the center of the story. Overly interpretive content, on the other hand, ignores the interesting and obsessively looks for a bigger theme.

“To qualify as news these days, an event must also fit into larger body of interpretations and themes. Many things that happen to individuals, although novel, must now get ignored unless reporters can link them to something bigger.”

They put it bluntly: “The recent stories are fiercely dull. Every researcher complained of boredom reading those throughout this study. They were difficult to recount or quote.” In 1960, more than 90 percent front page election stories in the New York Times were descriptive. By 1992, 80 percent were interpretive.

Here is an example of a story published in the Chicago Tribune in 1894:

It was a few minutes after 5 and the firemen were pouring great streams of water on the burning roof and the water was beginning to trickle through into the theater below, when the entire roof over the theater part of the building suddenly began to sink and in an instant dropped to the floor, fifty feet below. The ill-fated firemen had not a moment’s time to think of the possibilities of escape. A cry of horror went up from the firemen who saw the awful catastrophe. The people from the hotel, who had left their rooms, knew nothing of the frightful tragedy that was taking place in the theater. The crowd of onlookers who saw it knew nothing of the disaster until the firemen who had escaped with blanched faces ran to the street and tremulously told of the sad fate which had befallen their brave brothers, who were buried beneath the burning girders, roof, and floors in the theater.

As Barnhurst and Mutz note, this would never be published by a big newspaper today, and would be labeled as “poorly attributed, sensational, fabricated in detail and lacking contextual balance. However, today’s journalism fabricates other things: abstract themes, expert analyses and discouraging problems.”

The writing style of digital journalism is, in general, much closer to the exciting, descriptive reportage that transports the reader into a scene, and make him feel as if he was really there.

This doesn’t mean digital stories are really on-the-spot, investigative pieces. Most are not. But the relaxed style, usage of humor and sarcasm, detailed descriptions of people and events – a nonfiction style we identify with newspaper greats such as Twain or Hemingway – makes it seem they are.

It also makes them closer to the readers. The websites of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are much more likely to use humor, for example, and run exciting stories about individuals that don’t necessarily have the bigger context.

Also missing is the “objectivity template” found in print, defined by Schudson: the need to always present two points of view as a way to balance the story, regardless of how irrelevant, wrong or boring one of them might be. The requirement to always have an expert or an individual in the position of power commenting in the article, no matter whether his research field and knowledge add anything of importance.

Less of that is found online, on NYT and WSJ blogs such as DealBook, Bits or AllThingsD. Even big organizations are much more likely to experiment and be innovative online.

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Writing is not the only way digital has brought the 1890s back. The NYTimes.com interactive graphics, for example, are an entirely new way of presenting data and telling a story.

A recent one used a dynamic map to show the rental frequency of various Netflix titles in large metropolitan areas in the U.S. A print piece might have been bland, with no real human interactions and a bunch of statistics, none terribly surprising.

The online piece, however, was extraordinarily exciting, allowing the reader to play with the attractive map, zoom in on their, and other neighborhoods, and explore which movies proved to be popular in the past 12 months.

In addition, usage of video, slideshows and flash applications is much more common online than infographics or illustrations are in the print edition of the Times.

In 1880s and 1890s, newspapers started aggressively using illustrations, photographs and graphics in order to enhance their written stories – or, often, tell completely new ones. It was a groundbreaking novelty, one that was not received well by the more traditional outlets.

“The yellow papers’ usage of illustration is cheapening the news,” claimed Charles Anderson Dana, the editor of the New York Sun in that period. Similar critiques can be heard of multimedia pieces today.

All radically novel journalistic outlets are at first labeled as sensationalistic or cheap, even the quality ones. Especially the quality ones. “Sensationalism and cheapening of the news,” notes Whyte, “is always the cry of the newspaper to the rival which passes it.”

Many digital content forms, like maps or flash graphics, are not considered real journalism by the craft’s puritans. Before he was bashing New York’s papers of the 1890s, Charles Anderson had to deal with critics of his own paper, when it was the most innovative one on the market, in late 1870s and 1880s.

Their cry was, once again, “sensationalism, cheapening of real journalism, not real news.” But they were simply the new frontier of a relatively new industry – just like blogs and interactive flash graphics are today.

They are also using bold new writing styles, interesting headlines, SEO methods, visual augmentations and constant workflows to reach their readers. The reader is, once again, in the center of attention. Digital journalism thus means a long-awaited return to exciting journalism, one that is exciting, bold, different and unpredictable.

Because, as Whyte notes, “Who is to say how many cartoons, and bold headlines are too many? Who is to say what is genuine journalism and what is trivial or prurient?”