mr-damon/journalism

Since Mr. Terkel's death, testimonials have proliferated. "I think he was the most extraordinary social observer this country has produced," Robert Coles, professor of psychiatry at Harvard, told The Los Angeles Times.

"He was the quintessential American writer," Representative Dennis J. Kucinich wrote on The Nation's Web site, thenation.com. "He was our Boswell, our Whitman, our Sandburg." (Though wasn't Whitman already our Whitman and Sandburg our Sandburg?)

And without Mr. Terkel's radio program, which was broadcast daily between 1952 and 1997, and without his books of oral history -- including one that won him the Pulitzer Prize -- it is difficult to imagine that National Public Radio would have evolved in the way it did, or that Ken Burns could have made oral history into a cinematic tradition. Just dip into some of the imposing volumes of oral history, in which Mr. Terkel took on the social world of the 20th century -- "Hard Times," "The Good War" or "Working" -- and you are amazed at the range of people who spoke with him about the Depression, the Second World War or the world of the workplace: the bookmaker and the stockbroker, the carpenter and the washroom attendant, the mayor and the supermarket cashier. Mr. Terkel anticipated the academic movement of recent decades to tell history from below -- not from the perspective of the makers of history but from the perspective of those who have been shaped by it. He once said he was interested in the masons who might have built the Chinese Wall, or the cooks in Caesar's army. That is also one of oral history's implicit ambitions: using a populist style to tell populist history. The oral historian does little more than hold up a mirror, just making sure the glass is clean. The practice claims to be self-effacing and world-revealing. How can a collection of interviews be anything else?

Studs Terkel, a Pulitzer prize-winning author whose searching interviews with ordinary Americans helped establish oral history as an important historical genre, and who for nearly half a century was the voluble host of a radio show in Chicago, died Friday at his home in Chicago. He was 96.

His death was confirmed by Lois Baum, a friend and longtime colleague at WFMT radio.

In his oral histories, which he called guerrilla journalism, Studs Terkel relied on his enthusiastic but gentle interviewing style to elicit, in rich detail, the experiences and thoughts of ordinary Americans. "Division Street: America" (1966), his first best-seller and the first in a triptych of tape-recorded works, explored the urban conflicts of the 1960s. Its success led to "Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression"(1970) and "Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do"(1974). " `The Good War': An Oral History of World War II," won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

In "Talking to Myself," Mr. Terkel turned the microphone on himself to produce an engaging memoir, and more recently, in "Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession" (1992) and "Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It"(1995)' he reached for his ever-present tape recorder for interviews on race relations in the United States and the experience of growing old.

Although detractors derided him as a sentimental populist whose views were simplistic and occasionally maudlin, Mr. Terkel was widely credited with transforming oral history into a popular literary form. In 1985 a reviewer for The Financial Times of London characterized Mr. Terkel's books as "completely free of sociological claptrap, armchair revisionism and academic moralizing."

Stop and think about where you are reading this column. If you are one of the million or so people who are reading it in a newspaper that landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at the corner, you are in the minority. This same information is available to many more millions on this paper's Web site, in RSS feeds, on hand-held devices, linked and summarized all over the Web.

Historically, people took an interest in the daily paper about the time they bought a home. Now they are checking their BlackBerrys for alerts about mortgage rates.

"The auto industry and the print industry have essentially the same problem," said Clay Shirky, the author of "Here Comes Everybody." "The older customers like the older products and the new customers like the new ones."

For readers, the drastic diminishment of print raises an obvious question: if more people are reading newspapers and magazines, why should we care whether they are printed on paper?

The answer is that paper is not just how news is delivered; it is how it is paid for.

More than 90 percent of the newspaper industry's revenue still derives from the print product, a legacy technology that attracts fewer consumers and advertisers every single day. A single newspaper ad might cost many thousands of dollars while an online ad might only bring in $20 for each 1,000 customers who see it.

The difference between print dollars and digital dimes -- or sometimes pennies -- is being taken out of the newsrooms that supply both. And while it is indeed tough all over in this economy, consider the consequences.

New Jersey, a petri dish of corruption, will have to make do with 40 percent fewer reporters at The Star-Ledger, one of the few remaining cops on the beat. The Los Angeles Times, which toils under Hollywood's nose, has one movie reviewer left on staff. And dozens of communities served by Gannett will have fewer reporters and editors overseeing the deeds and misdeeds of local government and businesses.

The authors and book publishers looking for royalties from the Google deal may be the lucky ones in the old media sweepstakes. Print publishers are madly cutting, in part because the fourth quarter, postfinancial crisis, is going to be a miserable one. Advertising from the car industry, retail business and financial services -- for years, the three sturdy legs of a stool that print once rested comfortably on -- are in steep decline.

The most persistent falsehood about Senator Barack Obama's background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the Democratic convention speech that arguably set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: "Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion."

That statement was contained in a press release and it spun a complex tale about the alleged ancestry of Obama, who is Christian.

The press release was picked up by the conservative FreeRepublic.com Web site and spread virally and steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites and, ultimately, books. It continues to be an engine that drives other false rumors about Obama's background to this day, with one finding national, public voice on Friday, when a woman told Senator John McCain at a town-hall-style meeting, "I have read about him," and "he's an Arab." McCain corrected her.

Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyber-whisper campaign that still dogs Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs where he is a bête noir.

But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The Fox program allowed Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.

Robert Fisk delivered a raw and eye-opening account of his experiences in the Middle East, which have spanned over 32 years, drawing attention to the "hell disaster" stretching from the borders of what once was British India to the Mediterranean.

"It's a beautiful place but it's getting more dangerous and it's getting more politically divided and it's filling with more hatred than I've ever seen in the Middle East before.

"I have never come across so much bitterness and contempt for the West as there is now in the Middle East today. Whether we can place that all at George Bush's preposterous response to 9/11, I don't know."

The dangers as a Western journalist are very real for Fisk who has lived through kidnapping attempts.

"I think we are all frightened for our lives working out there. But we also think that we should still be working there. And thank goodness, there are millions of Muslims who try to help us and realise what we are trying to do."

While some publications, particularly American, "pussy-footed" around the reality of the so-called "war on terror", Fisk tried to get across the reality of what the Middle East was like and that it had suffered enormously, he said.

"I think you should be objective on the side of those who suffer. It's a massive human tragedy and there are very serious issues of justice and cruelty involved.

"I don't think the fear of being called anti-semitic, which many journalists are worried about, should stop you reporting to the reality about what's happening.

just after midnight Thursday morning, four protesters raised their fists and shouted slogans while waving a Tibetan flag near National Stadium. As with the other protests, the participants were quickly bundled away by plainclothes officers.

Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, said that German and British consular officials had told the families of the German and British detainees that they, too, would probably receive 10-day sentences.

Two photographers at the scene for The Associated Press were also roughed up and taken into custody, according to news agency reports and press freedom advocates. After the photographers were questioned separately for 30 to 40 minutes, the police confiscated the memory cards from their cameras.

In the past month, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China has received dozens of complaints from overseas journalists who were detained, trailed or had equipment damaged by the police.

"When it comes to media freedom during the Olympics, China is not even on the awards podium," said Jonathan Watts, the club's president.

On Friday, Students for a Free Tibet declared that its Olympics campaign had succeeded and that it was winding down. In characteristically stealthy fashion, the announcement was made by two members who summoned reporters to a street corner with 20 minutes' notice.

The members, Alice Speller and Ginger Cassady, said that even though the protests had been fleeting and witnessed by only a few Chinese, they had helped highlight the issue in the foreign media.

"China is trying to show the world this face, that they are a modern, progressive country, but that really isn't the truth," said Speller, a law student from Britain. "The real face is one that denies freedom of expression, and that denies it brutally and violently when it can."

Reporters Without Borders is encouraging journalists covering the Beijing Olympics to skirt censorship with tips on how to get around firewalls, lock computer files and find safe translators.

In a guide published on the Internet Wednesday, the Paris-based organization advised reporters Wednesday to conduct phone calls and write e-mails with the knowledge that they may be monitored.

China has backed away from a promise to lift all Internet blocks on foreign media.

The new guide will likely help only journalists who have not yet left for Beijing: The press freedom group says its Web site, rsf.org [rsf.org] , remains blocked in China.

Chinese officials assured news organizations "complete freedom to report" when bidding for the games seven years ago. The International Olympic Committee received further such assurances in April. But Kevan Gosper, a senior member of the IOC, said this week that the promise will apply only to sites related to "Olympic competitions."

If the conflict in Vietnam was notable for open access given to journalists -- too much, many critics said, as the war played out nightly in bloody newscasts -- the Iraq war may mark an opposite extreme: after five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiers.

It is a complex issue, with competing claims often difficult to weigh in an age of instant communication around the globe via the Internet, in which such images can add to the immediate grief of families and the anger of comrades still in the field.

While the Bush administration faced criticism for overt political manipulation in not permitting photos of flag-draped coffins, the issue is more emotional on the battlefield: local military commanders worry about security in publishing images of the American dead as well as an affront to the dignity of fallen comrades. Most newspapers refuse to publish such pictures as a matter of policy.

But opponents of the war, civil liberties advocates and journalists argue that the public portrayal of the war is being sanitized and that Americans who choose to do so have the right to see -- in whatever medium -- the human cost of a war that polls consistently show is unpopular with Americans. Journalists say it is now harder, or harder than in the earlier years, to accompany troops in Iraq on combat missions. Even memorial services for killed soldiers, once routinely open, are increasingly off limits. And while publishing photos of American dead is not barred under the "embed" rules in which journalists travel with military units, the Miller case underscores what is apparently one reality of the Iraq war: that doing so, even under the rules, can result in expulsion from covering the war with the military.