OP-ED Journalism's new digital world

Author: Robert Schlesinger

It's hard to get your mind around the extent to which the information revolution has changed the practice of gathering and relaying information, whether in online newspapers, or magazine stories or even history books (I've written all of the above).

You get used to the day-to-day of it all: It's not uncommon to connect with sources by phone or by e-mail (if you cover intelligence agencies, you might use a secure email account); press releases too arrive via email; the World Wide Web has created such information oversaturation that reporters have to refine skills of filtering out information.

The magnitude of these changes was brought home to me when I was working on White House Ghosts, my history of presidents and their speechwriters. I asked my father, the late historian (and Kennedy speechwriter) Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., about how he would research his books. Poring over White House files in a presidential library, he told me, he would have to hand-copy them (not even photocopiers were available); if he wanted to know how the press covered events he'd have to go to a newspaper morgue; what exactly did the president say on a specific occasion? The public papers of the U.S. presidents fill whole bookshelves. The actual writing involved either tape-recorded dictation or writing draft after draft on a manual typewriter. (Explanations of "newspaper morgue," "tape-recording," and "manual typewriter," if needed, can be found on the Web.)

That was then. When I found interesting speech drafts or memoranda, instead of photocopying them I would take pictures of the documents with my digital camera, feeling rather like James Bond (early Connery or Craig). Press coverage of Dwight Eisenhower's administration? The New York Times and Washington Post (and, really, every other newspaper these days) are searchable online, for a fee. Time's entire archive is online for free. Presidential speeches? The public papers of the U.S. presidents are searchable online. I digitally recorded interviews and stored them on the laptop computer on which I wrote the book.

What's next? Digitizing documents. Instead of perusing Truman White House memos at his library in Independence, Mo., I'll be able to grab them off the Internet from the comfort of my own couch.

There are drawbacks. Whether you're writing a first draft of history in a newspaper or a polished book version, you lose intangibles of being there - mood, interaction, atmosphere - if you're getting all of your information from the Web. There are some things that still don't translate electronically.

(Robert Schlesinger '94 is Deputy Editor for Opinion at U.S. News & World Report and author of White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters.)