I love this 1981 news segment about how some people were dialing in to CompuServe to read newspapers on their home computers. According to the report, it took two hours to download the paper at a cost of $5 per hour, and had everything the print edition had, with the (major) exception of pictures, ads and the comics.

They show a print ad about the new service, with the headline “Now, a world of information at your fingertips. Now.” The ad shows a computer with the full front page displayed on the monitor, presumably as a metaphor, and the report notes that “the electronic newspaper isn’t as spiffy-looking as the ads imply.”

Mr. Halloran, the home user interviewed in this piece, notes that he can go back in and copy articles to paper and save them, which he thinks is the “the future of the type of interrogation an individual will give to the newspapers.” An awkward way to put it, but he was talking about the power of search, and he was right.

This pieces is wonderfully nostalgic, for those of us of a certain age, showing the old home computer with the plain ASCII screen display, the acoustic coupler with the telephone handset jammed into it, and most importantly, the sense of excitement of the early adopters.

This is a career information film from 1940 makes journalism sound like a great career. Especially if you’re a man. Here’s the advice for girls considering this career choice:

“Women find it difficult to compete with men in general reporting jobs, so girls who want to be successful in journalism should prepare for work in the special women’s departments. Home decoration, child care, gardening and household hints are found in the homemaking section, a department handled by women. Also included are cookery, meal planning suggestions, menus, recipes and attractive ways of arranging the table.”

No, thanks! How confusing this must have been to high school girls in 1940, the same year Rosalind Russell played the fearless star report Hildegard Johnson in His Girl Friday!

Beyond the feminist issue, it’s rather sad to watch this film showing well-staffed newspapers with lots of reporters covering special beats at a time when newspapers are slashing their staffs and even starting to limit their printed editions.

“Faced with a failing business model, newspapers continued to slash staff through buyouts and layoffs. Some, like the Los Angeles Times, dismantled their Washington bureaus. Others threatened to shut down entirely. The irony: Rising online traffic suggests that newspapers are still vital and well-read. They just need to figure out how to get people to pay for their content. Perhaps in 2009?”

Source: Fey drilled Palin, Couric Got Cred, and Papers Saw Red
Boston Globe, December 28, 2008

In 1931, something happens to Thalia Massie, the young wife of a Naval officer stationed in Hawaii, but it almost certainly wasn’t what she said: a kidnapping and forced rape by a group of young Hawaiian men. At the trial, the defendants (of Hawaiian, Japanese and Chinese heritage) are acquitted, based on a lack of any sort of evidence other than falsely planted tire tracks.

What happens next is stranger than fiction. Thalia’s flamboyant, well-connected mother, who has come to the Islands to see her daughter through the ordeal, plots with Thalia’s husband and two sailors to take the law into their own hands, killing the supposed leader of the young men, and are almost immediately apprehended. This leads to an outpouring of support for Thalia’s socialite mother, officer husband, and the sailors.

This book is a great real-life courtroom thriller, as the great Clarence Darrow, seventy-five years old, defends the perpetrators of this “honor killing.” But the real focus is on the history and sociology of Hawaii at this moment in time, how this affected how these events occurred, and how this set of events changed life in Hawaii forever. There were tangled and complex relationships among the various social groups, including the native Hawaiians and the Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Portuguese workers and their descendants; the ruling white class, many of whom were descended from early missionary families that turned to commerce; and the Navy families stationed on the islands, many of whom brought with them a Jim Crow mentality from their upbringing in the South.

This book is also fascinating as a look at a true media event, and at the role of journalists in shaping a story, and how a story can get totally out of hand. The exaggerations and outright falsehoods published in respected news sources is shocking, but not unfamiliar to the modern reader.

Malcolm explores the uneasy, seductive and ethically complex relationship between journalist and subject, interviewer and interviewee, seen through the example of the lawsuit between convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, and author Joe McGinniss, author of Fatal Vision. Malcolm is painfully aware that while examining the relationship between journalist and subject, she also participates in these relationships with the people she interviews, including MacDonald.

Janet Malcolm’s examination of this troubling topic is especially interesting in light of her own experience in this area. She was sued by Jeffrey Masson over misquotations in a New Yorker article and her book In the Freud Archives. For more about this controversial book and its author, see this Salon article by Craig Seligman.