News Media

The intersection of knowledge and narrative, of informed journalism, is the heart of what the Journalist’s Resource project continues to explore. In the short essay below, Nicholas Lemann, a professor and dean emeritus at the Columbia Journalism School and a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, articulates a method for journalism that integrates knowledge while preserving the art of storytelling. We reprint it here with his permission:

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How are partisan media sources affecting the character of democracy? How extreme is media bias? What does the latest, deepest research say about these questions?

The Internet is an endlessly rich world of sites, pages and posts — until it all ends with a click and a “404 page not found” error message. While the hyperlink was conceived in the 1960s, it came into its own with the HTML protocol in 1991, and there’s no doubt that the first broken link soon followed.

It has always been risky for journalists to offend the powerful, rich and litigious. But until the digital age, American newspapers generally held their own: They rigorously checked facts and employed legal muscle to beat back bullies.