Definition: Fourth Estate

The Fourth Estate refers directly to journalists. The term comes from the idea of the three estates of the Ancien Regime: the First Estate is the clergy, the Second the nobles and the Third the commoners. The Fourth Estate is responsible for advocating the needs of the other three estates, as well as framing issues so that each estate can understand them.

There is a quasi-mythical attribution of the term to Edmund Burke, which Jeffrey Archer summed up in his novel, The Fourth Estate:

In May 1789, Louis XVI summoned to Versailles a full meeting of the Estate General. The First Estate consisted of three hundred clergy. The Second Estate, three hundred nobles. The Third Estate, six hundred commoners. Some years later, after the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, looking up at the Press Gallery of the House of Commons, said, 'Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than them all.'

Definition: New Journalism

New Journalism is a term used to describe the style of journalism practiced by Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, among many others. They introduced literary techniques to news writing, which was quite new and unconventional at the time (hence the name).

Techniques include:

• first-person point of view
• using scenes to tell a story
• conversational speech
• inclusion of everyday details
  

New journalism styles can be most effective in feature writing, or in book-length projects.

Just what the heck is Title IX, anyway?

The phrase "Title IX" commonly refers to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, or the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act.

Basically, Title IX is the rallying cry whenever a college is offering more money to men's sports than women's, or otherwise promoting men's athletics over women's. There's a whole lot of legalese behind it, but let me break it down to how it specifically affects students news media.

Odds are you cover your school's athletics, right? But maybe you don't have enough room to cover all the sports. Maybe this week, you're covering men's basketball, women's softball and men's golf.

Well, if you're supported financially by your school, that's not okay. If you're taking money for printing, administration, anything, you need to be giving equal coverage to both men's and women's athletics. (If you aren't funded in any way by the school, you can cover whatever you want, but someone will complain at some point if you give unequal coverage.)

Equal coverage is a pretty nebulous concept, too. Some people might count column inches, some might consider how many photos you run. The general rule I would recommend is running an equal number of articles over the course of the semester -- this will let you run a full section of football stories if you win the big bowl game and still be compliant.

Definition: Convergence journalism

Convergence journalism:

A form of journalism in which various forms of media (writing, video, photos, and more) are combined to create a larger journalistic project. The web is an ideal platform for convergence journalism, as evidenced by the move towards multimedia presentations at papers like The Washington Post.

Definition: Checkbook Journalism

Checkbook journalists pay their sources for the right to run a story.

Example: Larry Flynt's regular offers to pay for sex scandal stories involving politicians.

Television is supposedly more reliant on checkbook journalism than print media, but there is little evidence to support this claim.

On Wikipedia