Saving the News
Book Review of Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy
Author: Alex S. Jones
Reviewer: Shihua Wang, 100063016
Losing the News by Alex S. Jones, the Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter and Director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, is a very insightful and highly accessible book that provides readers with a judicious look into the significant impacts of digital transformations that have swept and changed the whole media industry. What’s more, those changes are directly harmful to the “core news”, the real news produced by expert journalists, which is essential for sustaining our democracy.
Organized in nine chapters, the book reveals different but connected types of loss that the media industry and even the whole society are painfully experiencing. The first chapter presents the concept of the iron news, which leads into a second chapter that focuses on the relationship between media and democracy. The third chapter applies the iron core into the First Amendment and law more generally, which is followed by two chapters that talk about professional norms as objectivity and ethics. The sixth chapter, pleasantly narrative, presents an interesting history of journalism from the author’s point of view.
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Today, we read less and less one “newspaper”. Today news organizations like the New York Times must deal with the continuous flow of information generated by the Internet and social networks. Therefore, journalists must learn to do their jobs on the Internet, which means being on the lookout for new ways to get informed and developing new practices and skills in order to feed this flow of information and venturing into new fields of inquiry. That’s the future of the media. And we need good core news produced by these professionals because the quality of the information provided by the media matters for political participation, and our democracy needs a well-informed
I say this because there were points in which I personally could not really understand what was going on due to my lack of exposure to this problem that American journalism is facing. More specifically, terminology that was used, especially from business standpoints, and the different companies that were involved made it harder to keep up with the issue at hand. However, with a little editing and better explanation of terminology, I think that this film could extend to a wide audience that would include both digital natives and digital immigrants that are experiencing this transition within American news reporting. This paper will examine the difference between old and new journalism and its new standards, “The New York Times Effect” and its 21st century challenges, important qualifications to be a successful journalist, and the future role of journalism within American society.
The author provides a rough timeline of the objective norm emerging in American journalism, and explains the inner origin of these co...
In “Reporting the News” by George C. Edwards III, Martin P. Wattenberg, and Robert L. Lineberry, the main idea is how the media determines what to air, where to get said stories that will air, how the media presents the news, and the medias effect on the general public. “Reporting The News” is a very strong and detailed article. The authors’ purpose is to inform the readers of what goes on in the news media. This can be inferred by the authors’ tone. The authors’ overall tone is critical of the topics that are covered. The tone can be determined by the authors’ strong use of transitions, specific examples, and phrases or words that indicate analysis. To summarize, first, the authors’ indicate that the media chooses its stories that will air
In his editorial "Words Triumph Over Images," Curtis Wilkie blames today’s media for being “reckless” and “a mutant reality show”. He believes that television and radio are “unfiltered”, which causes the quality of journalism for newspapers to be unmatched. Yet, it is unfair to label all media that is not print as lesser because the quality of any media relies on the viewers and the individual journalists, and in drastic situations like a hurricane, reporters may have many road blocks. Any of these aspects can affect the quality of journalism, which invalidates Curtis Wilkie’s claim.
It is not uncommon to hear people complaining about what they hear on the news. Everyone knows it and the media themselves knows it as well. Some of the most renowned journalists have even covered the the media’s issues in detail. Biased news outlets have flooded everyday news. We find that journalism’s greatest problems lie in the media’s inability for unbiased reporting, the tendency to use the ignorance of their audience to create a story, and their struggles to maintain relevance.
The Prime Minister of Spain once told an American, “The newspapers in your country seem to be more powerful than the government.” This statement was never more true than in 1898 during the Spanish-American War. The rulers of the New York newspaper empire, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, battled against one another in the ultimate test of journalism. With a real war on the horizon, these men fought to produce the most sensational stories Americans had ever read; and, as a result, they brought forth a new age in the American newspaper business, an age of fighting for the little guy, and beating back tyranny one paper at a time.
The introduction of the internet to modern society has brought about a new age of information relation. Since there is no longer a need to wait until the next print day, news from all over the world is available at a person’s fingertips within hours or even minutes of the event. With this advent of such easily accessible information, new problems for the news media have also arisen. Aside from potentially losing good economic standing because newspapers are no longer being purchased in the quantities they used to be, the credibility of the information itself is also put into question. No one would argue that credibility of news sources is unimportant, but there is a discrepancy in what takes precedence; economy and speed or getting the information out correctly at the first publishing by taking the time to make sure all facts are checked. The importance of having a system of checks on all information submitted is paramount. People trust what they read and believe it to be so without always questioning. If all information were to not be checked thoroughly, there would be instances where people read an article only for information included to be wrong and they go on believing such information. This can be very dangerous as misinformed people make misinformed decisions. With an increase in errors being made by citizen bloggers and even major publications, many are worried that journalistic ethics and credibility in the news media are being sacrificed in order to maintain swiftness in the news circuit and to retain personal profits. Though getting information to the masses quickly is a major part of the media’s importance, this should not mean that the credibility of that information being presented should be sacrificed for it...
The first is the crisis of viability. The chance of success in the journalism in the mainstream is approaching a decline due to the transformations in technologies and new access to multiple sources of information. The second is a crisis in civic adequacy. The contributions of journalism to citizenship and democracy have begun to shift and this shift has caused a question of the relevancy of journalism to democratic processes. In a democratic society journalism plays the role of the government watchdog. The effectiveness of society’s watchdog is now being challenged and in turn alternating the structure of the current democratic society. Many critical theorists of the press during the beginning of the 20th century were concerned with finding appropriate forms of public regulation of the press and journalism to ensure that journalists are writing “news and information about public affairs which sustains and nurtures citizen information, understanding and engagement and thereby a democratic polity” (Cushion and Franklin, 2015: 75) (Dahlgren, Splichal 2016). Journalism is a political entity that influences and informs the public. It is meant to work as a source of public information that helps and does not hinder the general public specifically in political processes. The article
Thirty years ago, if I told you that the primary means of communicating and disseminating information would be a series of interconnected computer networks you would of thought I was watching Star Trek or reading a science fiction novel. In 2010, the future of mass media is upon us today; the Internet. The Internet is and will only grow in the future as the primary means of delivering news, information and entertainment to the vast majority of Americans. Mass media as we know it today will take new shape and form in the next few years with the convergence and migration of three legacy mediums (Television, Radio, Newspaper) into one that is based on the Internet and will replace these mediums forever changing the face of journalism, media and politics. In this paper I will attempt to explain the transition of print media to one of the internet, how the shift to an internet based media environment will impact journalism and mass media, and how this migration will benefit society and forever change the dynamic of news and politics.
Split into four sections, the book breaks down the journalism industry and analyses its different components. Part one explores what flat earth news is by using the ‘Millennium bug’ as a case study. Section two breaks down the structure of news corporations, comparing the journalists to their bosses and how this relationship along with institutional
In order to understand new media, one must first have a solid background of the old media. The old media traces its origins back to the “elite or partisan press [that] dominated American journalism in the early days of the republic” (Davis 29). With the advent of the penny press around 1833, the press changed its basic purpose and function from obtaining voters for its affiliated political party to making profit (Davis 29). With more available papers, individual companies competed with each other with “muckraking journalism”—investigative journalism exposing corruption—and “yellow journalism”—sensationalist journalism that completely disregarded the facts (Davis 30). The press continued to evolve its journalistic approaches and next shifted to “lapdog journalism,” r...
"Journalists and Social Media | The Changing Newsroom." The Changing Newsroom | New Media. Enduring Values. Web. 05 Dec. 2010. .
It’s a question that keeps floating around in the public sphere: is print advertising and newspapers dead? The world is becoming more and more fast-paced and although, our want and need for the up-to-date news and breaking stories has not changed, the way in which we consume it has. This background report investigates and explains the downfall of the newspaper and the technological shift to online news. It will also discuss differing opinions of this relevant topic of the future of journalism from a range of reliable primary sources and investigative data.
In trying to attract new audiences, news media have begun to transition from reporting to becoming a form of entertainment. With the meteoric rise of social media’s role as a news source, the fight for an increase of diversity in the media, and the ever-growing desire of immediate content, the future of responsible journalism is more important than ever. Ask yourself, why do I think the way I do? Where do my political views originate? How do I prove them? Most likely, it is due to the biased portrayal of issues in the media and the politicization that accompanies what we consume. Now, compare your views to your preferred news reporting entity. More than likely, they are the same.
Encapsulated in a democratic homeland since the advent of time, media systems are habitually acclaimed as the “fourth power,” with its journalists often hailed as the “watch-dogs” of such a society. Lending itself to act as ‘gatekeeper’ for the wider society and performing the traditional role of journalism, the media (overall) exist as powerful “instruments of knowledge” that perform the function of providing information to the masses in a public sphere, where issues may be discussed, justified and contested (Scannell, 1995, p. 17). Evidently, media workers play a pivotal role in our society; however, their status in the realm of professions is not definite. Although the above emphasize the predicament at the heart of ...