Research

Far from being recent acquaintances, mass journalism and high technology have long been inseparable companions. When the London Times installed the first steam-powered presses in 1814, they not only quadrupled the speed of page production, they also vastly increased the paper’s reach and power. Later advances such as cameras, telegraphs and telephones — to say nothing of computers large and small — only deepened the relationship between the press and technology.

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.

“Follow the money,” the editor bellowed at the cub reporter. That’s something you hear a lot in newsrooms. And top reporters follow that advice.

Was Oakland the nation’s most dangerous city in 2013? Or was it Oakland and Flint? What is a valid distinction, statistically speaking? We show the uses of a “confidence interval.”

The following is an essay developed from the new book Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism, which serves as companion to Journalist’s Resource and represents an articulation of the project’s mission to help the news media transition to a new phase in their 21st-century development.