What IS News?

What IS News?

Author: Donnalyn Pompper

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-06-07

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 1000399338

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This volume explores contemporary understandings of "news values" and the "fake news" phenomena and collects together important new theory-building research that sheds light on implications of compromised news products and the ways it shapes perceptions. News does not happen in a vacuum and journalism is a practice with a definable milieu which manufactures a product shaped by a complex and subjective collection, organization, and dissemination of information. The social import of revisiting Herbert Gans’ "what is news" ethnographic query in 1979 played out in earnest in 2020. Americans watched news coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic offer politicized health information complete with conflicting reports of disagreeing experts, conspiracy theories, vaccination resistance, and racist language targeting China and people of Asian descent. This collection expands on mass communication theory frameworks built since the 1970s, to enable us to better operationalize and understand mass media’s role in defining, shaping, and amplifying news. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Mass Communication and Society.


News for the Rich, White, and Blue

News for the Rich, White, and Blue

Author: Nikki Usher

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2021-07-06

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0231545606

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As cash-strapped metropolitan newspapers struggle to maintain their traditional influence and quality reporting, large national and international outlets have pivoted to serving readers who can and will choose to pay for news, skewing coverage toward a wealthy, white, and liberal audience. Amid rampant inequality and distrust, media outlets have become more out of touch with the democracy they purport to serve. How did journalism end up in such a predicament, and what are the prospects for achieving a more equitable future? In News for the Rich, White, and Blue, Nikki Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of field research, she illuminates how journalists decide what becomes news and how news organizations strategize about the future. Usher shows how newsrooms remain places of power, largely white institutions growing more elite as journalists confront a shrinking job market. She details how Google, Facebook, and the digital-advertising ecosystem have wreaked havoc on the economic model for quality journalism, leaving local news to suffer. Usher also highlights how the handful of likely survivors—well-funded media outlets such as the New York Times—increasingly appeal to a global, “placeless” reader. News for the Rich, White, and Blue concludes with a series of provocative recommendations to reimagine journalism to ensure its resiliency and its ability to speak to a diverse set of issues and readers.


News Hole

News Hole

Author: Danny Hayes

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-09-16

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1108892515

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In recent decades, turnout in US presidential elections has soared, education levels have hit historic highs, and the internet has made information more accessible than ever. Yet over that same period, Americans have grown less engaged with local politics and elections. Drawing on detailed analysis of fifteen years of reporting in over 200 local newspapers, along with election returns, surveys, and interviews with journalists, this study shows that the demise of local journalism has played a key role in the decline of civic engagement. As struggling newspapers have slashed staff, they have dramatically cut their coverage of mayors, city halls, school boards, county commissions, and virtually every aspect of local government. In turn, fewer Americans now know who their local elected officials are, and turnout in local elections has plummeted. To reverse this trend and preserve democratic accountability in our communities, the local news industry must be reinvigorated – and soon.


Introduction to Journalism

Introduction to Journalism

Author: Carole Fleming

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780761941828

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An Introduction to Journalism examines the skills needed to work as a journalist in newspapers, television, radio, and online. This book provides case studies as a guide to researching stories, interviewing, and writing for each medium, as well as recording material for both radio and television. It offers a wide range of comments and tips on the best way to approach stories and includes interviews with journalists working on a variety of news outlets, from the BBC to weekly newspapers.


Making the News

Making the News

Author: Amber E. Boydstun

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-08-26

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 022606560X

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Media attention can play a profound role in whether or not officials act on a policy issue, but how policy issues make the news in the first place has remained a puzzle. Why do some issues go viral and then just as quickly fall off the radar? How is it that the media can sustain public interest for months in a complex story like negotiations over Obamacare while ignoring other important issues in favor of stories on “balloon boy?” With Making the News, Amber Boydstun offers an eye-opening look at the explosive patterns of media attention that determine which issues are brought before the public. At the heart of her argument is the observation that the media have two modes: an “alarm mode” for breaking stories and a “patrol mode” for covering them in greater depth. While institutional incentives often initiate alarm mode around a story, they also propel news outlets into the watchdog-like patrol mode around its policy implications until the next big news item breaks. What results from this pattern of fixation followed by rapid change is skewed coverage of policy issues, with a few receiving the majority of media attention while others receive none at all. Boydstun documents this systemic explosiveness and skew through analysis of media coverage across policy issues, including in-depth looks at the waxing and waning of coverage around two issues: capital punishment and the “war on terror.” Making the News shows how the seemingly unpredictable day-to-day decisions of the newsroom produce distinct patterns of operation with implications—good and bad—for national politics.


The News Media

The News Media

Author: C.W. Anderson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-08-11

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0190206225

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The business of journalism has an extensive, storied, and often romanticized history. Newspaper reporting has long shaped the way that we see the world, played key roles in exposing scandals, and has even been alleged to influence international policy. The past several years have seen the newspaper industry in a state of crisis, with Twitter and Facebook ushering in the rise of citizen journalism and a deprofessionalization of the industry, plummeting readership and revenue, and municipal and regional papers shuttering or being absorbed into corporate behemoths. Now billionaires, most with no journalism experience but lots of power and strong views, are stepping in to purchase newspapers, both large and small. This addition to the What Everyone Needs to Know® series looks at the past, present and future of journalism, considering how the development of the industry has shaped the present and how we can expect the future to roll out. It addresses a wide range of questions, from whether objectivity was only a conceit of late twentieth century reporting, largely behind us now; how digital technology has disrupted journalism; whether newspapers are already dead to the role of non-profit journalism; the meaning of "transparency" in reporting; the way that private interests and governments have created their own advocacy journalism; whether social media is changing journalism; the new social rules of old media outlets; how franchised media is addressing the problem of disappearing local papers; and the rise of citizen journalism and hacker journalism. It will even look at the ways in which new technologies potentially threaten to replace journalists.


Who Owns the News?

Who Owns the News?

Author: Will Slauter

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-01-29

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 1503607720

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Can a free press survive in an era of free content? An “entertaining and well-written” examination of copyright law, its history, and its purpose (New York Law Journal). You can’t copyright facts, but is news a category unto itself? Without legal protection for the “ownership” of news, what incentive does a news organization have to invest in producing quality journalism that serves the public good? Can a free press survive in the era of free content? This book explores the intertwined histories of journalism and copyright law in the United States and Great Britain, revealing how shifts in technology, government policy, and publishing strategy have shaped the media landscape. Publishers have long sought to treat news as exclusive to protect their investments against copying or “free riding.” But over the centuries, arguments about the vital role of newspapers and the need for information to circulate have made it difficult to defend property rights in news. Beginning with the earliest printed news publications and ending with the Internet, Will Slauter traces these countervailing trends, offering a fresh perspective on debates about copyright and efforts to control the flow of news. “A well-written, thoughtful book, demonstrating how copyright law has struggled to keep up with the development of news culture, setting out the historical context in great detail and supported by much research, and with interesting conclusions and predictions for the future. It is unreservedly recommended.” ––European Intellectual Property Review


News and How to Use It

News and How to Use It

Author: Alan Rusbridger

Publisher: Canongate Books

Published: 2020-11-26

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 1838851623

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A society that isn’t sure what’s true can’t function, but increasingly we no longer seem to know who or what to believe. We’re barraged by a torrent of lies, half-truths and propaganda: how do we even identify good journalism any more? At a moment of existential crisis for the news industry, in our age of information chaos, News and How to Use It shows us how. From Bias to Snopes, from Clickbait to TL;DR, and from Fact-Checkers to the Lamestream Media, here is a definitive user’s guide for how to stay informed, tell truth from fiction and hold those in power accountable in the modern age.