- Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab, I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight it's my pleasure to introduce to you Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen. She was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as was my dad. She went to high school at Divine Savior Holy Angels. And I went to a grade school that was called St. Mary's, so we would call us Divine Savior Partial Angels.  [laughter]  Catholic jokes sometimes don't always go over real well.  [laughter]  Then she came to UW-Madison to get an undergraduate degree in journalism. And then she got a master's degree at UW-Madison in journalism. And then, for variety, she's getting a PhD here at UW-Madison in...  - Journalism.  - Journalism. She will be done in May 2019. Mark your calendars for the party.  [laughter]  She's got a very interesting topic. As a Cooperative Extension person, I'm pretty tuned in to how the university, through the College of Agriculture over the centuries, has shared science with Wisconsin, but this is going to be interesting hearing about how the journalism folks have been sharing research from other parts of the university with the people across Wisconsin. Tonight she's going to be talking to us about "Promoting Innovation: Journalism, Science, and the Wisconsin Idea." Please join me in welcoming Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.  [applause]  -Thank you.  [applause]  Great, so before I go ahead and get started, thank you all so much for coming out tonight. I have planned to leave a few minutes at the end of this talk for questions. So if you have questions, I encourage you to write them down or remember them or save them for the end. I'll be more than happy to address those. But first, I want to kind of warn you that this presentation starts with an argument. Whether or not you agree with that argument, we can debate that later, but I need you to at least appreciate the argument that I'm going to lay out. And that is that the United States is a country that is built on a foundation of newspapers. It is a country where newspapers have long been incredibly important to not only the political processes but just the general flow of information from corner to corner of this vast expanse. As early as the turn of the 19th century, several foreign observers came to the United States and were struck by not only how many newspapers there were but how far they were distributed and how many people read them with regularity. They had not seen this in Great Britain, in France where they came from. Alexis de Tocqueville, French political scientist, wrote in 1840 that he was impressed by the enormous circulation of the daily press in the United States and the number of newspapers and their ties to political associations. He believed, after his observations made in the United States, that free press was vital to the preservation of liberty. Thomas Hamilton, a British traveler, wrote in the 1833 book "Men and Manners in America" that "the influence and circulation of newspapers "is great beyond anything ever known in Europe. "In truth, nine-tenths of the population read nothing else. "Every village, nay almost every hamlet, has its press, and newspapers penetrate to every crevice of the nation." So this centrality of the press to the political functioning of the United States was one of the reasons that Willard Bleyer, director of the journalism program at the University of Wisconsin, was so concerned when he looked out at the landscape of media at the turn of the 20th century. For when Bleyer looked out, what he saw, instead of all of this potential, were threats to democracy. He saw a media industry that had consolidated, independent newspapers were disappearing, and media chains were growing larger. He believed that he saw reporters who didn't actually report things as much as they edited wire copy or press releases that were handed to them by press agents. He also reporters who did not provide accurate accounts of complicated stories. They, number one, didn't cover the scientific advances that were so critical to this seemingly modern age of the turn of the 20th century, but when they did report complicated stories, they often reported false claims. In many cities that had had multiple newspapers just a few decades earlier, there were only one. And in cities where there were still multiple newspapers, a lot of those newspapers were owned by one person or one corporation. He saw new media technologies everywhere, the radio, the telephone, the motion picture, that were challenging the hold on the public imagination that was previously enjoyed by newspapers. And he saw newspapers that printed sensationalized news that was, in some cases, faked in an effort to win readers and beat competition in circulation.