New Media, Old News: Journalism And Democracy In The Digital Age

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‘New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age’ is a book of essays written by authors James Curran, Des Freedman, Angela Phillips, Nick Couldry, Peter Lee-Wright, Tamara Witschge, Aeron Davis, Joanna Redden, Rodney Benson and Natalie Fenton, who also edited the book. These essays are based on a large scale multi-year investigation into the journalistic practices of news organisations in the present day where the internet has made access to news instantaneous and the competition for speed and accuracy is fiercer than ever. It was carried out by Fenton and her eight aforementioned colleagues under the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre.
The book is split into twelve chapters that fit into five sections; ‘Introduction’, ‘New Media and News in Context’, ‘New Media and News in Practice’, ‘New Media, New Sources, New Journalism?’ and ‘New Media, News Content and International Context’.
Fenton opens her book by stating a list of questions that this book attempts to answer. These …show more content…

This section looked at openDemocracy, a news website that attempted to be an unaffiliated global news site that could generate a global public opinion. The idea that the entire population of the earth could have their views expressed through a single site was extraordinarily optimistic and short sighted. However, the notion that public opinion can be assessed through new media is an important one. I feel that we are moving towards a world where all of our democratic decisions will be made online. We already put so much of our personalities into the web and advertisers are quick to utilise this information. It seems only logical that we will do the same for the government and democracy will be better for it. I found the case study very interesting and think that it opened up an important topic of

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