Article Contentsp. 175p. 176p. 177p. 178p. 179p. 180p. 181p. 182p. 183p. 184p. 185p. 186p. 187p. 188p. 189p. 190p. 191p. 192p. 193p. 194Issue Table of ContentsDaedalus, Vol. 104, No. 2, Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium B.C. (Spring, 1975), pp. i-vi, 1-202Front MatterPreface to the Issue "Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium B.C." [pp. v-vi]The Age of Transcendence [pp. 1-7]The Fault of the Greeks [pp. 9-19]What Is a Breakthrough in History? [pp. 21-36]The Position of the Intellectual in Mesopotamian Society [pp. 37-46]The Changing Facets of Conservative Mesopotamian Thought [pp. 47-56]Transcendence in Ancient China [pp. 57-68]Ethical Monotheism [pp. 69-89]"Transcendence" and Intellectual Roles: The Ancient Greek Case [pp. 91-118]Ethics, Religion, and Social Protest in the First Millennium B.C. in Northern India [pp. 119-132]Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change [pp. 133-151]On the Comparative Understanding of Non-Modern Civilizations [pp. 153-172]AnticipationsA Note from the Editor [pp. 173-174]Writing News and Telling Stories [pp. 175-194]Back MatterWriting News and Telling StoriesAuthor(s): Robert DarntonSource: Daedalus, Vol. 104, No. 2, Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspectives on the FirstMillennium B.C. (Spring, 1975), pp. 175-194Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & SciencesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024337Accessed: 25/08/2009 16:38Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress.Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected] MIT Press and American Academy of Arts & Sciences are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Daedalus.http://www.jstor.orgROBERT DARNTON Writing News and Telling Stories All the news that fits we print. From the graffiti in the pressroom of police headquarters, Manhattan, 1964 This essay is a personal report on the experience of writing news.1 It resulted from an attempt to circumnavigate the literature on communication theory, diffusion studies, and the sociology of the media, which I undertook in the expectation of finding a new approach to the French Revolution. As a historian of propaganda and radical ideology, I have always held onto the hope that the social sciences will pro vide a kind of Northwest Passage to the past. I ran aground, however, while reading "Newsmen's Fantasies, Audiences, and Newswriting" by Ithiel de Sola Pool and Irwin Shulman in Public Opinion Quarterly (Summer, 1959). That article touched off an analysis of my earlier experience as a reporter, which I offer with the wish that it may point to some fruitful lines of inquiry, despite its subjective character. The Pool-Shulman Study Pool and Shulman got newspapermen to conjure up images of their public through a process of free association. They asked thirty-three reporters to name per sons who came to mind as they were going over stories they had just completed. Some reporters named persons whom they liked and whom they expected to react warmly to stories conveying good news. Others imagined hostile readers and took a certain pleasure in providing them with bad news. The comparison of the fantasies about "supportive" and "critical" readers suggested that the affective component in a reporter's image of his public might influence the accuracy of his writing. Pool and Shulman tried to test this distortion factor by supplying four groups of thirty-three journalism students each with scrambled facts taken from stories that communicated both good news and bad news. Each student assembled the facts into his own version of the story and then listed persons who came to mind while thinking back over the writing. He then was interviewed to determine the degree of approval or criticism that he attributed to the persons on his list, and his story was checked for accuracy. The experimenters found that writers with supportive "image persons" reported good news more accurately than they reported bad news, and that writers with critical "image persons" reported bad news with more accuracy. Pool and Shulman conclud ed that accuracy was congruent with a reporter's fantasies about his public. 175176 ROBERT DARNTON The experiment suggests how current theories about mass communication may be applied to research on the media. Now that sociologists no longer think of com munication as a ?rie-way process of implanting messages in a relatively passive "mass" audience, they can analyze the audience's influence on the communicator. Having become sensitive to the importance of feedback and noise, they can under stand how a writer's image of his public shapes his writing. But they sometimes fail to take into consideration another element, which is conspicuously absent from the Pool Shulman study, namely, the communicator's milieu. Reporters operate in city rooms, not in classrooms. They write for one another as well as for the public. And their way of conceiving and communicating news results from an apprenticeship in their craft. Translated into sociological language, those observations suggest four hypotheses: in order to understand how newspapermen function as communicators, one should analyze (1) the structure of their milieu, the city room; (2) their relation to primary reference groups, i.e., editors, other reporters, and news sources; (3) their oc cupational socialization, or the way they get "broken