Marvel And DC Comics Face Backlash Over Pay: ‘They Send A Thank You Note And $5,000 – The Movie Made $1 Billion’

 As comics giants make billions from their storylines and characters, writers & artists are speaking out about the struggles for fair pay.

(Sam Thielman, The Guardian, 9 August 2021)

Watch any superhero movie and you will see a credit along the lines of “based on the comic book created by”, usually with the name of a beloved and/or long-dead writer or artist. But deep, deep in the credits scroll, you will also see “special thanks” to a long roster of comic book talent, most of them still alive, whose work forms the skeleton and musculature of the movie you just watched. Scenes storyboarded directly from Batman comics by Frank Miller; character arcs out of Thor comics by Walt Simonson; entire franchises, such as the Avengers films or Disney+ spinoff The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, that couldn’t exist without the likes of Kurt Busiek or Ed Brubaker.

The “big two” comic companies – Marvel and DC - may pretend they’ve tapped into some timeless part of the human psyche with characters such as Superman and the Incredible Hulk, but the truth is that their most popular stories have been carefully stewarded through the decades by individual artists and writers. But how much of, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) $20bn-plus box office gross went to those who created the stories and characters in it? How are the unknown faces behind their biggest successes being treated?

Not well, according to Brubaker who, with Steve Epting, revived Captain America’s sidekick Bucky Barnes to create the Winter Soldier, portrayed by Sebastian Stan in Marvel’s films and shows. “For the most part, all Steve and I have got for creating the Winter Soldier and his storyline is a ‘thanks’ here or there, and over the years that’s become harder and harder to live with,” Brubaker recently wrote in a newsletter.

“I have a great life as a writer and much of it is because of Cap and the Winter Soldier bringing so many readers to my other work,” he added. “But I also can’t deny feeling a bit sick to my stomach sometimes when my inbox fills up with people wanting comments on the show.” (Marvel told the Guardian it had to “decline to comment out of respect for the privacy of [Brubaker and Epting’s] personal conversations [with the company].”)

Comic creators are “work-for-hire”, so the companies they work for owe them nothing beyond a flat fee and royalty payments. But Marvel and DC also incentivise popular creators to stay on with the promise of steady work and what they call “equity”: a tiny share of the profits, should a character they create or a storyline they write become fodder for films, shows or merch. For some creators, work they did decades ago is providing vital income now as films bring their comics to a bigger audience; they reason – and the companies seem to agree – it’s only fair to pay them more. DC has a boilerplate internal contract, which the Guardian has seen, which guarantees payments to creators when their characters are used. Marvel’s contracts are similar, according to two sources with knowledge of them, but harder to find; some Marvel creators did not know they existed.

A Marvel spokesman said there was no restrictions on when creators could approach the company about contracts, and said that they are having ongoing conversations with writers and artists pertaining to both recent and past work. A DC spokesman did not return multiple requests for comment. But the use of these contracts is at these companies’ discretion and the promised money can fall by the wayside.

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” Jim Starlin, who created Thanos, recently told the Hollywood Reporter; Starlin negotiated a bigger payout after arguing that Marvel had underpaid him for its use of Thanos as the big bad of the MCU. Prolific Marvel writer Roy Thomas got his name added to the credits of Disney+ series Loki after his agent made a fuss. But these are creators that Marvel needs to keep happy; things can go very differently if nobody cares when you complain.

Bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote a run of Marvel’s Black Panther and followed Brubaker and Epting’s Captain America run with his own a few years later, says that he believes Marvel has moral obligations to its artists and writers that go beyond contracts.  “Long before I was writing Captain America, I read [Brubaker and Epting’s] Death of Captain America storyline, and Return of the Winter Soldier, and it was some of the most thrilling storytelling I’d ever read,” Coates says. “I’d rather read it than watch the movies – I love the movies too – but it doesn’t seem just for them to extract what Steve and Ed put into this and create a multi-billion dollar franchise.”

Coates says he feels fairly treated when it comes to his own work, but he is adamant that lesser known names deserve better treatment from the big studios, no matter what their contracts say: “Just because it’s in a contract doesn’t make it right. If I have some kind of leverage over you, I can get you to sign a contract to fuck you over. It’s just legalist.”

Over the decades, Marvel and DC have become parts of Fortune 500 companies: the Walt Disney Company owns Marvel, and DC is owned by a subsidiary of AT&T. Now, deciding what share of the success their comic creators deserve is a matter of complex wrangling between Marvel and DC, which want to maintain good relations with their talent, and the vast bureaucracies above them.

Among creators, there is a general sense that it has become harder to get paid at Marvel. One source told the Guardian that Marvel subtracted its own legal fees from a protracted negotiation over royalty payments. Others who have worked for DC and Marvel say both count on artists and writers preferring not to spend time chasing them for royalties.

“Lawyer up, always, with comic book company contracts,” says Jimmy Palmiotti, longtime writer of DC characters such as Jonah Hex and Harley Quinn. “They are not in the business of feeding you the math.” Once a year, freelancers are allowed to audit the returns on their creations for DC and Marvel, but Palmiotti says it happens too rarely: “I can count on one hand the number of creators who’ve actually audited a major comics company.”

According to multiple sources, when a writer or artist’s work features prominently in a Marvel film, the company’s practice is to send the creator an invitation to the premiere and a cheque for $5,000 (£3,600). Three different sources confirmed this amount to the Guardian. There’s no obligation to attend the premiere, or to use the $5,000 for travel or accommodation; sources described it as a tacit acknowledgment that compensation was due.  Marvel declined to comment on this, citing privacy concerns. “We can’t speak to our individual agreements or contracts with talent,” said a spokesman.

Several sources who have worked with Marvel say that remuneration for contributing to a franchise that hits it big varies between the $5,000 payment, nothing, or – very rarely – a “special character contract”, which allows a select few creators to claim remuneration when their characters or stories are used. There are other potential ways to earn more – many former writers and artists are made executives and producers on Marvel’s myriad movies, cartoons and streaming series, for example – but those deals depend on factors other than legal obligation.  “I’ve been offered a [special character contract] that was really, really terrible, but it was that or nothing,” says one Marvel creator, who asked not to be named. “And then instead of honouring it, they send a thank you note and are like, ‘Here’s some money we don’t owe you!’ and it’s five grand. And you’re like, ‘The movie made a billion dollars.’”

Both Marvel’s “special character contract”, or DC’s equivalent, a “creator equity” contract, are ways to keep creators happy enough that they don’t hold back all of their original creations for competitors. DC pioneered these contracts back in the 1970s and 1980s, responding in part to Marvel’s treatment of Captain America creator Jack Kirby. Jim Shooter, then Marvel’s editor-in-chief, refused to return original art to Kirby unless he signed a lengthy release form allowing the company to adapt his creations – including the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Black Panther and the X-Men – without any compensation. DC saw an opportunity to score PR points, and offered Frank Miller, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons what appeared to be much better contracts for works such as Ronin and Watchmen. (The company used a technicality to renege within a few years).

Brubaker has recalled once attending Comic-Con, where he watched Roz Kirby yell at Jim Shooter about his mistreatment of her husband in the middle of a panel on creators’ rights. (The panel, incidentally, included Moore and Miller, who were celebrating the apparent fairness of their own contracts at DC.) Decades later, Brubaker helped Marvel find success with his Captain America run with Steve Epting. According to sources, Brubaker and Epting showed up in tuxedos to the premiere party for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a movie directly based on their comics, only to find that they weren’t on the list. Brubaker texted Sebastian Stan, the actor who played his and Epting’s character, Bucky Barnes, and he let them in.

Some creators told the Guardian that they did not know that Marvel even had the special character contract like DC. In fact, the Guardian has seen an application for the “Marvel Special Character Contract”, in which creators can formally ask Marvel whether one of their characters qualifies for extra payouts. In the application form, Marvel explicitly reserves the right to tell creators their characters aren’t original enough to get the bonus, warning that “the decisions are final” and not subject to appeal. DC uses the same measure; in 2015, the studio was criticised for cancelling payments to writer Gerry Conway for his character Power Girl, which the company retroactively decided was derivative of Supergirl and therefore ineligible for the contract, according to Conway. He no longer receives payments for her, he confirmed to the Guardian. DC did not respond to request for comment.

The Power Girl incident highlights how ethically fuzzy these contracts are, since they’re issued by DC and Marvel, drawn up unilaterally by the companies, and paid out when the companies account for their many films, TV shows, video games, trading cards, action figures and sundry other merch. One creator, who asked to remain anonymous, said he and other creators sometimes go to Target to take pictures of action figures of their characters for which payments are due, to demonstrate that their cheques are short.

DC and Marvel came into their own at a time of change in copyright law. The Copyright Act of 1976 gave artists the one-time right to cancel their contracts with IP holders, an option many exercised after witnessing the mistreatment of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who were left penniless. Artist Al Jaffee once claimed his pay cheques from EC Comics were issued with contracts on the back, so he couldn’t cash them without signing over the rights to his work. This was a common practice throughout the industry, including at Marvel, and one that was reevaluated in the wake of the act.

As comics publishers evolved into major media operations, their staff grew concerned about mistreatment of talent. There were famous fights over royalties, and thorny questions over what credit was due to thousands of co-creators working in a shared universe. In 2000, a consortium of publishers founded a charity to directly aid artists who’d fallen on the hardest times, called the Hero Initiative. (Marvel is a founding member, and AT&T lets employees donate directly from their paycheques.) By the 1980s, people who worked in comics at every level were fans, in the same way that even the ushers on Broadway can sing and dance if called upon. In 1986, DC editor Paul Levitz and DC president Jeanette Kahn were working on new schemes to more fairly compensate writers and artists. Moore, Gibbons, and Miller’s contracts were meant to usher in a new era of fairness. It was a long time coming: some were already looking askance at DC after its treatment of Siegel and Shuster came to light during the production of the 1978 film Superman.

But Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen was a huge success, going through multiple reprints – unprecedented for a graphic novel – and DC never had to let its right to republish lapse, so it never did. The pair had a right to a share of merchandise profits; DC produced merch, classified it as “promotional items” and told Moore and Gibbons they weren’t owed anything. The vaunted in-house contracts that can make creators’ lives livable can always be subverted.

To the extent that there is any semblance of fairness in the industry now, it’s primarily Levitz’s doing, alongside Kahn and Karen Berger, who is now at Dark Horse Comics. Levitz left DC in 2009, but his influence is still felt across the industry.  “You want to create a situation where you never get to the old Russian joke where they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work,” Levitz says. “You want people to win when the companies win. I’m proud of the fact that we improved the quality of how we treated creative people.” More than one creator recounts calling Levitz to ask for more money because of a scene in a lucrative Batman movie that lifted plot points or names from their work, then being shocked when they got it.

Many of his peers say that Levitz was a bulwark against meddling by executives at Warner Brothers. For years, he blocked the publication of Watchmen sequels, of which Moore and Gibbons disapproved – something DC did soon after Levitz left, to widespread condemnation. Without another Levitz, the “big two” are once again attracting the criticism that led to the creation of these elusive “special” contracts in the first place. Some creators have left the medium entirely, but others have founded their own studios, such as Image and Dark Horse, providing creators with alternative outlets. As Marvel and DC may find, more creators – Brubaker and Jupiter’s Legacy creator Mark Millar are already among them – will simply not work for them again.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/09/marvel-and-dc-face-backlash-over-pay-they-sent-a-thank-you-note-and-5000-the-movie-made-1bn?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1

Anonymous Sources: The Mysteries Of Journalism Everyone Should Know

By Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post, 10 December 2017)

When Houston Chronicle reporters want to use information from an unnamed source in a news story, they have to jump through a few hoops first.  A senior editor has to approve it, and know who the source is. A single unnamed source is rarely enough to go ahead with a story — there must be two sources with the same firsthand knowledge. And one of a handful of top editors must sign off on its use before publication.  “The one exception to the two-source rule is when we have a ‘golden source’ — for example, the police chief talking about an investigation,” said Nancy Barnes, the Chronicle’s executive editor. 

The vetting process is similar at many large news organizations — and it’s just one of the practices that journalists assume, perhaps incorrectly, that news consumers understand.  Anonymous sourcing is one of the least-understood of the mysteries.  “A lot of people seem to think that when we use anonymous sources, we don’t even know who they are — that they’re anonymous to us,” said Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery.

That’s definitely not the case. Anonymity is granted to known sources under tightly controlled circumstances because they can’t speak on the record with their names attached for a variety of reasons.  News organizations try to limit their use, embarking on crackdowns and then sometimes backsliding.  Peter Baker, a reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, said (to a surprised reaction) at a journalism conference last week that Times Washington reporters no longer may use “blind quotes” — direct quotations with no names attached. 

I asked a few prominent journalists to describe what they wish news consumers knew about our business, but probably don’t. I was prompted to do so after the undercover provocateurs known as Project Veritas released a video featuring a Post reporter and then crowed about their supposed exposé: The video showed him describing how harshly critical of President Trump he has found The Post’s staff-written editorials.

That’s hardly a secret — the editorials, which represent the consensus of the paper’s editorial board, are published, after all. (Last year, a group of such critical editorials was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.)  But Project Veritas was taking advantage of the fact that news consumers don’t make a distinction between news reporters and editorial writers. Inside The Post’s building, though, that split is clear. News reporters and news-side editors strive for impartiality  — they want to keep their opinions out of their work. By contrast, editorial writers and columnists are not only allowed to have an opinion, it’s in their job description.

So, what would some of these experienced news people like you to know?   Ben Smith, editor in chief of BuzzFeed, told me he wishes readers would understand that sourcing isn’t always simple. A high-profile source isn’t always a hero and may have motivations that have little to do with serving the best interests of democracy.  “I have always wished the public understood how complex and messy sourcing is, and how often sources’ motives are personal or complex. While I appreciate the romantic portrayal of reporters and sources in movies like ‘The Post’  — and while whistleblowers from Daniel Ellsberg to the #MeToo voices are truly heroes — Mark Felt is a much more typical source,” Smith said, referring to the former FBI official who became the Watergate source known as “Deep Throat,” in part because he had an ax to grind within the Nixon-era Justice Department. 

Smith added that reporting is “an ethically complicated business whose responsibility is singularly to deliver true stories to the audience.” But how journalists get there can be discomfiting, he observed. BuzzFeed’s recent exposé of alleged sexual misconduct by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) told readers that its information was supplied by Mike Cernovich, the far-right media personality who has promoted conspiracy theories.  Richard Tofel, president of the nonprofit investigative reporting organization ProPublica, told me he wishes the public would get how seriously journalists take errors.  “I don’t think people widely understand how hard journalists work to get stories right,” he said. “Accuracy is the first requirement journalists have of each other, for instance, when considering hiring or promotion. Corrections (and even uncorrected mistakes) are badges of dishonor.”

Tofel noted that even small mistakes frequently disqualify long stories from prestigious awards. Journalists do make mistakes, of course, and we’ve seen far too much of that recently. “But,” he said, “reporters these days work very hard to get stories straight, and accurate, and fair.”  Frank Sesno, director of George Washington University’s media school, told me he wishes people understood the “the vetting process, the checks and balances that viewers never see that television networks do (or should) as a matter of course.”

Sesno, a former Washington bureau chief for CNN, added: “At CNN, a whole group, the Row, exists to vet scripts, to make sure sound bites are used in context, to fact-check. They send scripts back when there is any question.”  There is far more checking, corroborating, debating, arguing, vetting than any viewer could possibly know, Sesno said.  “It belies the prevailing narrative of ‘fake’ news — because the very systems in place are there (when used and used correctly) to generate skepticism about stories and sources, to put the brakes on confirmation bias and leaps of journalistic faith.”

Of course, journalists do mess up sometimes. They can fall prey to confirmation bias, allow anonymous sources to run amok, fail to be fair and impartial. Perhaps most often and most foolishly, they can move too fast to publish in a highly competitive environment.  And then, in a business based on credibility, there’s a price to pay.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-do-you-use-an-anonymous-source-the-mysteries-of-journalism-everyone-should-know/2017/12/10/fa01863a-d9e4-11e7-a841-2066faf731ef_story.html?utm_term=.dcfdf5647657&wpisrc=nl_evening&wpmm=1

John Oliver Has Given Us The Best Defense Of Newspapers Ever

By Kathleen Parker, Washington Post, 09 August 2016)

  John Oliver in 2014. (Eric Liebowitz/HBO)

Every couple of years or so, I feel the need to whine about the plight of newspapers. It’s August. I’m Trumped out. So today’s the day.  Except that HBO’s John Oliver beat me to it with the best defense of newspapers — ever. His recent “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” monologue about the suffering newspaper industry has gone viral in journalism circles but deserves a broader audience.  Besides, it’s funny.

Leavening his important message with enough levity to keep the dopamine flowing, Oliver points out that most news outlets, faux, Fox and otherwise, essentially rely on newspapers for their material. This includes, he says, pulsing with self-awareness, Oliver himself. He’s sort of part of the problem, in other words, but at least he knows it, which makes it okay, sort of.

The problem: People want news but they don’t want to pay for it.  Consequently, newspapers are failing while consumers get their information from comedy shows, talk shows and websites that essentially lift material for their own purposes.

But somewhere, somebody is sitting through a boring meeting, poring over data or interviewing someone who isn’t nearly as important as he thinks he is in order to produce a story that will become news. As Oliver points out, news is a food chain, yet with rare exceptions, the most important members of the chain are at the bottom, turning off the lights in newsrooms where gladiators, scholars and characters once roamed.  

Some still do, though most are becoming rather long-ish in the tooth. (You can actually get that fixed, you know.)  That any newspapers are surviving, if not for much longer in any recognizable form, can be attributed at least in some part to the dedication of people who really believe in the mission of a free press and are willing to work harder for less — tweeting, blogging, filming and whatnot in addition to trying to write worthy copy. Most of the poor slobs who fell in love with the printed word go unnoticed by any but their peers.

An exception is Marty Baron, the unassuming executive editor of The Post, recently featured in the film “Spotlight,” about the Boston Globe’s stories under Baron’s leadership uncovering sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. It’s a good movie, not just because of great casting and acting but because it’s a great tale about a massive investigative effort that led to church reform and the beginning of healing for victims. (Not to worry, my pay comes as a percentage of the money I make for the company. This won’t make a dime of difference.)

My point — shared by Oliver — is that only newspapers are the brick and mortar of the Fourth Estate’s edifice. Only they have the wherewithal to do the kind of reporting that leads to stories such as “Spotlight.” What happens to the “news” when there are no newspapers left?  We seem doomed to find out as people increasingly give up their newspaper subscriptions and seek information from free-content sources. And though newspapers have an online presence, it’s hard to get readers to pay for content.  As Oliver says, now is a very good time to be a corrupt politician. Between buyouts, layoffs and news-space reductions, there’s hardly anyone paying attention.

Except, perhaps, to kitties.  In a hilarious spinoff of “Spotlight” called “Stoplight,” Oliver shows a short film of a news meeting where the old-school reporter is pitching a story about city hall corruption. The rest of the staff, cheerful human topiaries to the reporter’s kudzu-draped mangrove — are more interested in a cat that looks like a raccoon.  And then there’s Sam Zell, erstwhile owner of the Tribune Co., who summed up the sad trajectory of the nation’s interests and, perhaps, our future while speaking to Orlando Sentinel staffers in 2008. When he said he wanted to increase revenues by giving readers what they want, a female voice objected, “What readers want are puppy dogs.”

Zell exploded, calling her comment the sort of “journalistic arrogance of deciding that puppies don’t count. . . . Hopefully we get to the point where our revenue is so significant that we can do puppies and Iraq, okay? [Expletive] you.”  Yes, he said that.  Moral of the story: If you don’t subscribe to a newspaper, you don’t get to complain about the sorry state of journalism — and puppies you shall have.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/john-oliver-has-given-us-the-best-defense-of-newspapers-ever/2016/08/09/ec04219e-5e6d-11e6-9d2f-b1a3564181a1_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1

The Future Of Journalism

Pushing To The Future Of Journalism

(A project of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, 20 December 2013)

 

To close out 2013, we asked some of the smartest people we know to predict what 2014 will bring for the future of journalism. Here’s what they had to say.

 

Dan Gillmor

Building on the Snowden effect

“If journalism is to matter, we can’t just raise big topics. We have to spread them, and then sustain them.”

 

Amy Webb

The future of news is anticipation

“Our interests are temporal, as is the news cycle. But those two don’t always align perfectly.”

 

Staci D. Kramer

Connecting the dots

“We have some serious firepower to throw at problems — and far too often, we have no idea if those problems already have good solutions.”

 

Miguel Paz

Fire the consultants

“Finally, some Latin American newsrooms will start understanding that news nerds — developers coding in the public interest within media — are an essential part of quality reporting.”

 

Juan Antonio Giner

Day-old news won’t cut it in print anymore

“For all these reasons, if we don’t change the editorial model, our print product becomes just a compilation of old news, known stories, and heard comments. Dead bodies. Forensic journalism.”

 

Tiff Fehr

More math

“Driven by FiveThirtyEight’s steadiness in the 2012 presidential election headwinds, today we seem to ask more questions about finding the best algorithm, model, or statistic.”

 

David Jacobs

Getting closer to the global newsroom

“Writers need to find readers wherever they are, and as more media is produced on mobile devices and the process of consumption begins to look more and more like creation, this will become obvious.”

 

Alfred Hermida

The year we get smart about social media

“Reporters are not trained to talk about the holes in their reporting. But in a stream of constant updates, adding notes of caution can have much value.”

 

Mariano Blejman

Latin American change will come from startups

“Understanding our proper audience will be disruptive at a time when the media has mostly left demographic analysis to social networks.”

 

Michelle Johnson

Mobile-first design

“Web design really becomes less about the web and more about mobile.”

 

Elise Hu

Tomorrow’s metric for news is action

“As journalism gets more one-to-one, causes become more personal, and communities divide into subsets of subsets, someone will find a metric to meet the moment.”

 

Dan Shanoff

Find starters, not stars

“It’s a trap to conflate popularity and the ability to build a new property.”

 

Adrienne Debigare

Getting past the data paradox

“Our future as an industry lies in our ability to tap into the resources and empirical insights that Big Data offers without eroding the trust of our users.”

 

Henry Blodget

Appreciating the digital difference

“It is the newsrooms that are embracing these differences, as opposed to fighting them, that are growing and innovating as the medium develops.”

 

Etan Horowitz

A toddler’s view of the future of media

“Consumers will increasingly expect to find their favorite media brands on new devices and platforms.”

 

Felix Salmon

The veracity of viral

“To a large degree, this is a discussion which only journalists, and maybe the occasional underemployed philosopher, could ever care about.”

 

Pablo Boczkowski

Paying more attention to the public

“The year ahead might bring news organizations that will pay more attention to the public. While that might be good for their bottom lines, it might also be bad for the quality of our democratic life.”

 

Cory Haik

News that anticipates the reader’s needs

“Now is the time to push the boundaries and use the best of those worlds in the service of storytelling.”

 

Martin Langeveld

Understanding the billionaire media gambles

“No grand strategy, no new business models for news will emerge from Omaha. Ultimately, these papers will be closed or sold.”

 

Sue Schardt

Big can learn from small in public radio

“We will begin to see fresh faces and hear new and unexpected voices on public media platforms that will grow over time.”

 

Ed O'Keefe

Mobile, social, video

“Instagram, Facebook, Vine, Twitter, and Snapchat (srsly) are news mediums — because that’s where the audience is.”

 

Reyhan Harmanci

Brand balance and the rise of middleform

“The most successful media companies have figured out how to translate their core ideas into any number of forms.”

 

Elizabeth Green

The continued rise of single-subject sites

“More niche nonprofit news organizations will be unmistakably good for democracy. The more knowledgeable our news sources, the more knowledgeable we can be as citizens and policymakers.”

 

Jason Kottke

The blog is dead, long live the blog

“The Stream might be on the wane but still it dominates. All media on the web and in mobile apps has blog DNA in it and will continue to for a long while.”

 

Jenna Wortham

The future of news is… Sasha Fierce

“The demand is there if the experience is new enough and original enough.”

 

James Robinson

Think audiences, not just metrics

“2014 is the year that newsrooms will begin to think of analytics as a way to increase the quality of their readership, not just the quantity.”

 

Tasneem Raja

Hashtags will matter again

“The levels of wit, critical thinking, domain knowledge, netspeak literacy, digital acumen — and, of course, diversity — on display in these conversations should have editors sitting up and taking note.”

 

Justin Auciello

The stronger citizen reporter

“Covering the realities of everyday life — car accidents, house fires, general police activity, weather emergencies — is well suited to the citizen journalist.”

 

Carrie Brown-Smith

Startups need to address real needs

“The startups most likely to succeed will be those that are closest to their communities and that have an intimate understanding of their readers’ information-seeking behaviors and motivations.”

 

Lauren Rabaino

The year we contextualize the news

“We’re limiting the opportunity for our readers to understand all the intersecting impacts by reducing context to a few paragraphs of background.”

 

Katie Zhu

Moving responsive design beyond screen size

“Newsrooms are going to start thinking about responsive in terms of tailoring experiences based on a reader’s context in the physical world.”

 

Rick Edmonds

A plea for better audience metrics

“One- or two-time visitors are not a business opportunity — they are an accident.”

 

Evan Smith

Chill, self-appointed integrity cops

“The hand-wringing about native advertising will give way to hand-clapping at the prospect of someone paying for serious journalism.”

 

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

The coming disruption of television news

“When it comes to the future of news, as when it comes to so many other things, it is worth following the money.”

 

Sarah Marshall

Smarter mobile and social

“News sites will find new ways to use social media to surface stories from the archives and extend the lifecycle of content.”

 

Adrienne LaFrance

The rise of the fluid beat structure

“Just imagine having a beat not tethered to a physical place or set topic, but an abstract and ever-changing linked set of ideas that you get to explore in real-time with other curious people.”

 

Hassan Hodges

Data reaches the optimization loop

“The initial consumer of content is increasingly not human. The consumer is software, and software’s favorite food is data.”

 

Mandy Brown

A beautiful experience all the way down

“No story should depend upon the presence of videos and other interactive elements; stripped of all styles and embeds, a story should remain readable and compelling on its own.”

 

Jim Schachter

Breaking audio out of radio’s boundaries

“Our news reports and stories increasingly will be produced and packaged in forms divorced from the formats dictated by a radio clock.”

 

Damon Kiesow

A new beacon for local advertising revenue

“Apple has once again short-circuited an entire industry and started a land grab to connect the realms of digital advertising and physical transactions.”

 

Matt Haughey

Even if it’s fake, it’s real

“In the end, they spark important conversations about important topics, and those conversations don’t feel lessened if and when an original story gets undermined.”

 

Maria Bustillos

News as a dynamic, living conversation

“The most interesting thing about the cream rising to the top faster is that the best writers on a given subject can find each other faster.”

 

Matt Waite

The drone age is here, and so are the lawyers

“It’s a matter of time — and I think that time is 2014 — until a paparazzo with no training and a drone bought off the Internet crashes into a very pretty face.”

 

Philip Bump

Better location data = better witnesses to news

“We’ve proven to be relatively bad at verifying authenticity in the face of a culture that seems weirdly amused by tricking the press.”

 

Jennifer Brandel

Becoming more agile

“Audience engagement techniques will begin shifting away from the mindset of ‘What can they do for us?’ to ‘What can we do for them?’”

 

Jan Schaffer

Lost in the gloom, an entrepreneurial boom

“Let’s stop the handwringing about losses in legacy journalism and work on creating and growing the next acts in media.”

 

Erika Owens

The year to eradicate impostor syndrome

“In 2014, we’ll all need to challenge ourselves to more publicly share and document not just how we deal with insecurity, but how we build our skills, networks, and confidence.”

 

Scott Klein

Scooped by code

“Every skill you don’t have leaves a whole class of stories out of your reach. And data stories are usually the ones that are hiding in plain sight.”

 

Allen Tan

Gaps and bridges

“Institution-making is a messy process, but it doesn’t have to be a lonely one.”

 

Michael Schudson

A spotlight, not a truth machine

“The answer will be what it has been since Walter Lippmann got it right 90 years ago.”

 

Fiona Spruill

Wearable tech creeps into the mainstream

“Smart journalists should experiment now, because at least one of these devices will move out of the geeks-only realm before we know it.”

 

Raju Narisetti

Loosen the newsroom’s chokehold on the brand

“The privileged status a newsroom enjoys ought to come with accountability and a responsibility to help sustain both journalism and the business of journalism.”

 

The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age. 

 

http://www.niemanlab.org/collection/predictions-2014/?wpisrc=nl_lunchln

Nora Ephron

The Most Of Nora Ephron

(Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post, 15 November 2013)

"A couple of years before Nora's death in 2012," Robert Gottlieb writes in his brief introduction to this collection, "she and I sat down to begin putting together the table of contents for this book. Then other things got in the way - her play, 'Lucky Guy'; a movie script she was working on - and it was set aside. Perhaps, too, knowing how ill she was, she began to see the book as a memorial and that made her uncomfortable - she never said. But although I was aware of her dire medical situation, the original impulse behind the book was not to memorialize but to celebrate the richness of her work, the amazing arc of her career, and the place she had come to hold in the hearts of so many readers."

Ephron - I knew her very slightly and liked her very much - died in June of last year at the age of 71, though it's awfully difficult to picture her as that old. She had been diagnosed six years earlier with acute myeloid leukemia but died after contracting pneumonia, an infection to which leukemia patients are susceptible and against which many of them have little resistance. Apparently she faced her illness with the same humor and grit she brought to any undertaking, but she never wrote directly about it, at least not for public consumption. There are hints of her condition in the last pieces here, "What I Won't Miss" and "What I Will Miss," but it's telling that these were published in November 2010, nearly two years before her death; I assume that her final months were spent polishing "Lucky Guy," which opened on Broadway this year and is enjoying what looks to be a long run.

The combination of her preoccupation with the play and her reluctance to become deeply involved in the organization of this collection left that task largely in the hands of Gottlieb, whose long and noteworthy career at Knopf included editing most of her previous books. "I think I know what she would have wanted this book to be," he says, "and her family allowed me to shape it." The result is not an omnium gatherum - more on that in a moment - but "a portrait of a writer, a log of a writer's career, and an unofficial - and unintended - report on feminism in her time." We see her here as "a reporter, a profilist, a novelist, a screenwriter, a playwright, a memoirist, and a (wicked) blogger - blogging came along just in time for her to lash out fiercely at the bad old days of Bush/Cheney."

"The Most of Nora Ephron" has nine sections. "The Journalist" includes her funny and affectionate memoir of her apprenticeship at the New York Post and, among others, her devastating takedown of Theodore H. White, maestro of the "Making of the President" books. "The Advocate" is notable for her commencement address to the Class of 1996 at Wellesley College, her alma mater. "The Profiler: Some Women" has pieces about Dorothy Parker, Jan Morris, Helen Gurley Brown and others. "The Novelist," "The Playwright" and "The Screenwriter" include, respectively, "Heartburn," "Lucky Guy" and "When Harry Met Sally." "The Foodie" takes on Gourmet magazine and the "Food Establishment," the section's two highlights. "The Blogger" covers a number of pieces she wrote in the previous decade for the Huffington Post. Finally, "Personal" will please her most devoted readers because it includes two of her most famous pieces, "A Few Words About Breasts" and "I Feel Bad About My Neck."

I mention the Wellesley address not merely because it is very good as such things go but because it gives us a clue to where she was as this collection was being assembled. She told the new graduates, "This is something ... I want to tell you, one of the hundreds of things I didn't know when I was sitting here so many years ago: you are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever." Amen. She continued:

"We have a game we play when we're waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was your age, I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those things turned up on my list: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up on my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy."

That was more than 17 years ago. It would be nice to know what the five things would have been in, say, 2010, but they surely would have included aging, the subject that comes to the fore in her later work, and probably there would have been some hint of her illness and her awareness of her mortality. She touches directly on aging and obliquely on mortality in "I Feel Bad About My Neck," "I Remember Nothing" and "The O Word" - the first being about the physical changes, none of them for the better, that affect all of us of both sexes as we grow older; the second about the irritating memory lapses to which we geriatrics are susceptible; the third simply about getting on in years, the "O Word" being, of course, "old."

In her life as in many others, the trend can be tracked from young, ambitious and unencumbered, to middle-aged, settled and responsible, to aging, regretful, resigned. Gottlieb, who is now more than 10 years older than Ephron was when she died, seems to have made his selections for this volume with the last of these outlooks in mind, though probably he did so instinctively rather than deliberately. Whatever the explanation for it, "The Most of Nora Ephron" tends to emphasize the serious side of her and play down the funny side, just as she eliminated "funny" after her second round of listmaking. This is fine, but it means that this book, in which, according to its dust wrapper, "everything you could possibly want from Nora Ephron is here," is by no means as inclusive as readers who know her work well would expect. Most notably and grievously, it reduces to little more than token representation her first three books of journalism: "Wallflower at the Orgy" (1970), "Crazy Salad" (1975) and "Scribble Scribble" (1978).

No doubt my bias is strongly influenced by my own long career in journalism and my fondness for mordant wit, but I think these are Ephron's best books. Nearly a decade ago, writing about "Crazy Salad" in my Second Reading series, I said: "At the time Ephron started movie work, I thought that Hollywood's gain was journalism's loss, and a rereading of all three of her collections leaves me even more firmly convinced of that." Nothing in "The Most of Nora Ephron" persuades me that I was wrong. Everything in this volume is all good for the simple reason that she wrote it, but too much is missing and some of what's included is less durable than Gottlieb obviously believes it to be. Though Ephron's wit is much on display in the 24 blog posts herein published, their evanescence is palpable, and by the same token the absence of some of the best pieces from those first three books is equally so.

Thus we do have her withering piece from "Scribble Scribble" about Dorothy Schiff, owner of the New York Post for part of Ephron's stay there, but we do not have "People Magazine," "Brendan Gill and The New Yorker" or "The Sperling Breakfast," each a small classic, from the same book. We have "The Food Establishment" from "Wallflower at the Orgy" but not "The Fountainhead Revisited" or "A Rhinestone in a Trash Can and 'The Love Machine' Phenomenon of J. Susann," from the same. We have "A Few Words About Breasts" and "Dorothy Parker" from "Crazy Salad," but not "Rose Mary Woods - the Lady or the Tiger" or "Crazy Ladies II," her remarkably empathetic snapshot of Martha Mitchell, also from the same.  Yes, I know, a book can only be so long, and choices have to be made. Some good choices went into the making of "The Most of Nora Ephron," and people who love her work will want to have it on their shelves. But be grateful that those first three books are all still in print, because when it comes to Nora Ephron, they are the sine qua non.

http://www.arcamax.com/entertainment/bookreviews/s-1425566

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: Discussions, Full Text And Analysis

 

150 Years After The Gettysburg Address, Is Government By The People In Trouble?

(By Drew Gilpin Faust, Washington Post, 24 November 2013)

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Civil War is that it was fought at all. Even when sectional discord culminated in Southern secession in the winter of 1860-61, many Americans remained confident that military conflict could be avoided. Sen. James Chesnut of South Carolina dismissed talk of war by pledging to drink whatever blood might be shed. And in his March 1861 inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln insisted that “there needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless it be forced upon the national authority.”  Even those who did expect armed conflict thought hostilities would be brief and losses minor.  At the war’s outset, it seemed almost unimaginable that the North would be willing to fight so long and hard to keep the Southern states in the Union. Confederate military strategy in fact came to rest on an assumption that the North would not sustain its commitment to war in the face of escalating sacrifice. Gen. Robert E. Lee’s search for the decisive battle, his invasions of the North, the Confederacy’s eager anticipation of Lincoln’s electoral defeat in 1864 — all represented a costly and fatal underestimation of the commitment of some 2.2 million Northern soldiers, overwhelmingly volunteers, to the preservation of the Union.

With the inevitability of hindsight, with the nation preserved and projected toward the global leadership we have come to take for granted, we rarely consider that the North might in the mid-19th century have made a different decision, might have let the South secede or perhaps have negotiated a peace in the face of Confederate military successes during the war’s early years. And those millions of Yankee soldiers might have proved unwilling to fight.  Today our military includes only 1 percent of our population. Could we mobilize the equivalent of the Union army? In 1860, the Northern states had 22 million inhabitants; 10 percent of them served; more than 360,000 of them died, offering what Lincoln called “the last full measure of devotion.” Would 31 million of our 314 million inhabitants be willing to risk their lives for the nation today? What cause, what circumstances, would motivate them?

Except during Lee’s two brief incursions into the North, Union soldiers of the 1860s were not fending off an invasion or protecting their homes and firesides. Many came from towns and farms at great distances from the Confederacy, from Wisconsin or Michigan or Vermont or Maine. But they came to understand themselves as fighting for something at once more abstract, more selfless, more transcendent and more powerful than their self-interest. We should, to borrow Lincoln’s words uttered 150 years ago this Tuesday, “never forget what they did” and why they did it. Never forget the still-unfinished work they so nobly advanced. Never forget why they chose — and yes, it was for almost all a choice — to fight.  And we must not forget why that leaves a legacy of responsibility for all of us.

I often wonder if the North would have fought, if the ranks would have filled, if there had been a different president — one less able to articulate the war’s meaning and purposes with an eloquence that grew alongside the war’s costs and sacrifices. The song “We Are Coming Father Abra’am, 300,000 More,” popularized after Lincoln’s appeal for additional volunteers in 1862, captures the way in which his call upon the people came to represent the national imperative in the public mind. Could his predecessor in the White House, James Buchanan, have mobilized 2.2 million men?

Lincoln’s rhetoric and, more important, the ideals that rhetoric embodied evolved from the first inaugural address, with its invocation of ties that bound the young nation together in memory and hope, to the Gettysburg Address, with its definition of the war’s true meaning and the nation’s fundamental identity and mission. His language offered to lift Americans above what they might otherwise understand themselves to be, to invest them in the work of saving a nation that was, as he put it in his annual message to Congress in 1862, “the last, best hope of Earth.”  In the course of the war, Lincoln succeeded in defining the American project — what it was, why it mattered and what it required of citizens. As efforts to establish and sustain democracy failed around the world, as Europe turned back toward despotism after the failed revolutions of 1848, government conceived in liberty seemed increasingly imperiled. America’s war was not just about America.

Secession, Lincoln proclaimed in a message to Congress in July 1861, threatened “more than the fate of these United States.” It involved “the whole family of man” in its challenge to “a government of the people, by the same people.” What was at risk was “free government upon the Earth.”  The war, he went on, was “essentially a people’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men — to lift artificial weights from all shoulders — to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life. . . . I am most happy to believe that the plain people understand and appreciate this.” 

And Lincoln made sure they did. Here in the first summer of the war were the germs of the ideas and ideals that 28 months and tens of thousands of Union deaths later became the Gettysburg Address. But by the fall of 1863, those deaths had brought something new to Lincoln’s understanding and his language. The terrible reality of war’s suffering had come to require that the nation for which so much had been sacrificed be more than just a promise or a hope, even a “last, best hope.” At Gettysburg, Lincoln demanded that the uncountable number of lost lives be rendered purposeful, worth their expense of blood and pain. Now, in 1863, he chose active words such as “dedicate” and “resolve,” words far more compelling than “hope.”  There must be a benefit, he insisted, for the price already paid, a benefit commensurate with the war’s terrible cost, a cost that at the outset no one had expected.

With the sense of obligation in his juxtaposition of three uses of “shall” — “shall not have died in vain,” “shall have a new birth of freedom,” “shall not perish” — Lincoln conveyed the significance of the expanded purposes of the war. It was no longer just about the union, about national survival; it was now about a particular sort of union, a better, freer nation than those in 1861 could have imagined. The struggle had not begun as a war to end slavery; only gradually did emancipation emerge as a purpose of Union victory.  Lincoln urged his audience at Gettysburg to persevere in the “unfinished work” before them. Another fearful year and a half of war lay ahead, with yet again as many deaths to come. But Appomattox would not end the work he envisioned. It was the obligations of freedom and nationhood as well as those of war that he urged upon his audience. Seizing the full meaning of liberty and equality still lay ahead.

These are responsibilities that belong to us still. Yet on the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s immortal speech, where is our stewardship of that legacy? After beginning a new fiscal year by shutting down the government, we are far from modeling to the world why our — or any — democracy should be viewed as the “best hope” for humankind. The world sees in the United States the rapid growth of inequality; the erosion of educational opportunity and social mobility that “afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life”; the weakening of voting rights hard-won over a century of post-Reconstruction struggle.  Is this the nation, the “proposition” to which Lincoln demanded we be dedicated? We can never forget what brave Americans did at Gettysburg, and at Shiloh and Antietam and the Wilderness and on so many battlefields since. But is it not now altogether fitting and proper that we heed Lincoln’s exhortation and rededicate ourselves to honoring those dead by ensuring that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth?

 

Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard University, is a historian and author of “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/150-years-after-the-gettysburg-address-is-government-by-the-people-in-trouble/2013/11/15/b37841f0-4bdf-11e3-be6b-d3d28122e6d4_story.html

Retraction For Our 1863 Editorial Calling Gettysburg Address 'Silly Remarks'

(By Patriot-News Editorial Board The Patriot-News& Matt Zencey, November 17, 2013)

The Patriot & Union devoted all of one paragraph to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: "We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them, and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of."  Seven score and ten years ago, the forefathers of this media institution brought forth to its audience a judgment so flawed, so tainted by hubris, so lacking in the perspective history would bring, that it cannot remain unaddressed in our archives.

We write today in reconsideration of “The Gettysburg Address,” delivered by then-President Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the greatest conflict seen on American soil. Our predecessors, perhaps under the influence of partisanship, or of strong drink, as was common in the profession at the time, called President Lincoln’s words “silly remarks,” deserving “a veil of oblivion,” apparently believing it an indifferent and altogether ordinary message, unremarkable in eloquence and uninspiring in its brevity.

In the fullness of time, we have come to a different conclusion. No mere utterance, then or now, could do justice to the soaring heights of language Mr. Lincoln reached that day. By today’s words alone, we cannot exalt, we cannot hallow, we cannot venerate this sacred text, for a grateful nation long ago came to view those words with reverence, without guidance from this chagrined member of the mainstream media.  The world will little note nor long remember our emendation of this institution’s record – but we must do as conscience demands:
In the editorial about President Abraham Lincoln’s speech delivered Nov. 19, 1863, in Gettysburg, the Patriot & Union failed to recognize its momentous importance, timeless eloquence, and lasting significance. The Patriot-News regrets the error.

  

A Voice From The Dead

(Patriot & Union Editorial, Tuesday, Nov. 24, 1863)

We have read the oration of Mr. Everett. We have read the little speeches of President Lincoln, as reported for and published in his party press, and  we have read the remarks of the Hon. Secretary of State, Wm. H. Seward, all delivered on the occasion of dedicating the National Cemetery, a plot of ground set apart for the burial of the dead who fell at Gettysburg in the memorable strife which occurred there between the forces of the Federal Government and the troops of the Confederacy of seceded States. To say of Mr. Everett's oration that it rose to the height which the occasion demanded, or to say of the President's remarks that they fell below our expectations, would be alike false. Neither the orator nor the jester surprised or deceived us. Whatever may be Mr. Everett's failings he does not lack sense - whatever may be the President's virtues, he does not possess sense. Mr. Everett failed as an orator, because the occasion was a mockery, and he knew it, and the President succeeded, because he acted naturally, without sense and without constraint, in a panorama which was gotten up more for his benefit and the benefit of his party than for the glory of the nation and the honor of the dead. 

We can readily conceive that the thousands who went there went as mourners, to view the burial place of their dead, to consecrate, so far as human agency could, the ground in which the slain heroes of the nation, standing in relationship to them of fathers, husbands, brothers, or connected by even remoter ties of marriage or consanguinity, were to be interred. To them the occasion was solemn; with them the motive was honest, earnest and honorable. But how was it with the chief actors in the pageant, who had no dead buried, or to be buried there; from none of whose loins had sprung a solitary hero, living or dead, of this war which was  begotten of their fanaticism and has been ruled by their whims?

They stood there, upon that ground, not with hearts stricken with grief or elated by ideas of true glory, but coldly calculating the political advantages  which might be derived from the solemn ceremonies of the dedication. 

We will not include in this category of heartless men the orator of the day;  but evidently he was paralyzed by the knowledge that he was surrounded  by unfeeling, mercenary men, ready to sacrifice their country and the liberties of their countrymen for the base purpose of retaining power and accumulating wealth. Hi oration was therefore cold, insipid, unworthy the occasion and the man. 

We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation  we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of.

But the Secretary of State is a man of note. He it was who first fulminated the doctrine of the irrepressible conflict; and on the battle field and burial ground of Gettysburg he did not hesitate to re-open the bleeding wound, and proclaim anew the fearful doctrine that we are fighting all these bloody  battles, which have drenched our land in gore, to upset the Constitution, emancipate the negro and bind the white man in the chains of despotism.

On that ground which should have been sacred from the pollution of politics, even the highest magnate in the land, next to the President himself, did not hesitate to proclaim the political policy and fixed purpose of the administration; a policy which if adhered to will require more ground than Gettysburg to hold our dead, and which must end in the ruin of the nation. The dead of Gettysburg will speak from their tombs; they will raise their voices against this great wickedness and implore our rulers to discard from their councils the folly which is destroying us, and return to the wise doctrines of the Fathers, to the pleadings of Christianity, to the compromises of the Constitution, which can alone save us. Let our rulers hearken to the dead, if they will not to the living - for from every tomb  which covers a dead soldier, if they listen attentively they will hear a solemn sound invoking them to renounce partisanship for patriotism, and to save the country from the misery and desolation which, under their present policy, is inevitable.

http://blog.pennlive.com/opinion/print.html?entry=/2013/11/a_patriot-news_editorial_retraction_the_gettysburg_address.html

  

The Gettysburg Address

(By Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863)

On June 1, 1865, Senator Charles Sumner referred to the most famous speech ever given by President Abraham Lincoln. In his eulogy on the slain president, he called the Gettysburg Address a "monumental act." He said Lincoln was mistaken that "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." Rather, the Bostonian remarked, "The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech."

There are five known copies of the speech in Lincoln's handwriting, each with a slightly different text, and named for the people who first received them: Nicolay, Hay, Everett, Bancroft and Bliss. Two copies apparently were written before delivering the speech; the remaining ones were produced months later for soldier benefit events. Despite widely-circulated stories to the contrary, the president did not dash off a copy aboard a train to Gettysburg. Lincoln carefully prepared his major speeches in advance; his steady, even script in every manuscript is consistent with a firm writing surface, not the notoriously bumpy Civil War-era trains. Additional versions of the speech appeared in newspapers of the era, feeding modern-day confusion about the authoritative text.

Bliss Copy

Ever since Lincoln wrote it in 1864, this version has been the most often reproduced, notably on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. It is named after Colonel Alexander Bliss, stepson of historian George Bancroft. Bancroft asked President Lincoln for a copy to use as a fundraiser for soldiers (see "Bancroft Copy" below). However, because Lincoln wrote on both sides of the paper, the speech could not be reprinted, so Lincoln made another copy at Bliss's request. It is the last known copy written by Lincoln and the only one signed and dated by him. Today it is on display at the Lincoln Room of the White House.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863

Nicolay Copy
Named for John G. Nicolay, President Lincoln's personal secretary, this is considered the "first draft" of the speech, begun in Washington on White house stationery. The second page is writen on different paper stock, indicating it was finished in Gettysburg before the cemetery dedication began. Lincoln gave this draft to Nicolay, who went to Gettysburg with Lincoln and witnessed the speech. The Library of Congress owns this manuscript.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.”

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war. We come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow, this ground – The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.

It is rather for us, the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Hay Copy

Believed to be the second draft of the speech, President Lincoln gave this copy to John Hay, a White House assistant. Hay accompanied Lincoln to Gettysburg and briefly referred to the speech in his diary: "the President, in a fine, free way, with more grace than is his wont, said his half dozen words of consecration." The Hay copy, which includes Lincoln's handwritten changes, also is owned by the Library of Congress.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.


Everett Copy
Edward Everett, the chief speaker at the Gettysburg cemetery dedication, clearly was impressed by Lincoln's remarks and wrote to him the next day saying, "I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes." In 1864 Everett asked Lincoln for a copy of the speech to benefit Union soldiers, making it the third manuscript copy. Eventually the state of Illinois acquired it, where it's preserved at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here, have, thus far, so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.


Bancroft Copy
As noted above, historian George Bancroft asked President Lincoln for a copy to use as a fundraiser for soldiers. When Lincoln sent his copy on February 29, 1864, he used both sides of the paper, rendering the manuscript useless for lithographic engraving. So Bancroft kept this copy and Lincoln had to produce an additional one (Bliss Copy). The Bancroft copy is now owned by Cornell University.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Source for all versions: Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler and others.

http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm