Second Read

Second Read
Author: James Marcus
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2012
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0231159315

This anthology includes, among many other enlightening essays, Rick Perlstein on Paul Cowan's 'The Tribes of America'; Nicholson Baker on Daniel Defoe's 'A Journal of the Plague Year', Marla Cone on Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring', and much more.

The Story So Far

The Story So Far
Author: Bill Grueskin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2011-06-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0231500548

Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves spent close to a year tracking the reporting of on-site news organizations some of which were founded over a century ago and others established only in the past year or two and found in their traffic and audience engagement patterns, allocation of resources, and revenue streams ways to increase the profits of digital journalism. In chapters covering a range of concerns, from advertising models and alternative platforms to the success of paywalls, the benefits and drawbacks to aggregation, and the character of emerging news platforms, this volume identifies which digital media strategies make money, which do not, and which new approaches look promising. The most comprehensive analysis to date of digital journalism's financial outlook, this text confronts business challenges both old and new, large and small, suggesting news organizations embrace the unique opportunities of the internet rather than adapt web offerings to legacy business models. The authors ultimately argue that news organizations and their audiences must learn to accept digital platforms and their constant transformation, which demand faster and more consistent innovation and investment.

The Watchdog That Didn't Bark

The Watchdog That Didn't Bark
Author: Dean Starkman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2014-01-07
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0231536283

The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter details “how the U.S. business press could miss the most important economic implosion of the past eighty years” (Eric Alterman, media columnist for The Nation). In this sweeping, incisive post-mortem, Dean Starkman exposes the critical shortcomings that softened coverage in the business press during the mortgage era and the years leading up to the financial collapse of 2008. He examines the deep cultural and structural shifts—some unavoidable, some self-inflicted—that eroded journalism’s appetite for its role as watchdog. The result was a deafening silence about systemic corruption in the financial industry. Tragically, this silence grew only more profound as the mortgage madness reached its terrible apogee from 2004 through 2006. Starkman frames his analysis in a broad argument about journalism itself, dividing the profession into two competing approaches—access reporting and accountability reporting—which rely on entirely different sources and produce radically different representations of reality. As Starkman explains, access journalism came to dominate business reporting in the 1990s, a process he calls “CNBCization,” and rather than examining risky, even corrupt, corporate behavior, mainstream reporters focused on profiling executives and informing investors. Starkman concludes with a critique of the digital-news ideology and corporate influence, which threaten to further undermine investigative reporting, and he shows how financial coverage, and journalism as a whole, can reclaim its bite. “Can stand as a potentially enduring case study of what went wrong and why.”—Alec Klein, national bestselling author of Aftermath “With detailed statistics, Starkman provides keen analysis of how the media failed in its mission at a crucial time for the U.S. economy.”—Booklist

Provoking the Press

Provoking the Press
Author: Kevin M. Lerner
Publisher: University of Missouri
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-02-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780826222886

At the beginning of the 1970s, broadcast news and a few newspapers such as The New York Times wielded national influence in shaping public discourse, to a degree never before enjoyed by the news media. At the same time, however, attacks from political conservatives such as Vice President Spiro Agnew began to erode public trust in news institutions, even as a new breed of college-educated reporters were hitting their stride. This new wave of journalists, doing their best to cover the roiling culture wars of the day, grew increasingly frustrated by the limitations of traditional notions of objectivity in news writing and began to push back against convention, turning their eyes on the press itself. Two of these new journalists, a Pulitzer Prize—winning, Harvard-educated New York Times reporter named J. Anthony Lukas, and a former Newsweek media writer named Richard Pollak, founded a journalism review called (MORE) in 1971, with its pilot issue appearing the same month that the Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers. (MORE) covered the press with a critical attitude that blended seriousness and satire—part New York Review of Books, part underground press. In the eight years that it published, (MORE) brought together nearly every important American journalist of the 1970s, either as a writer, a subject of its critical eye, or as a participant in its series of raucous "A.J. Liebling Counter-Conventions"—meetings named after the outspoken press critic—the first of which convened in 1974. In issue after issue the magazine considered and questioned the mainstream press's coverage of explosive stories of the decade, including the Watergate scandal; the "seven dirty words" obscenity trial; the debate over a reporter's constitutional privilege; the rise of public broadcasting; the struggle for women and minorities to find a voice in mainstream newsrooms; and the U.S. debut of press baron Rupert Murdoch. In telling the story of (MORE) and its legacy, Kevin Lerner explores the power of criticism to reform and guide the institutions of the press and, in turn, influence public discourse.

Beyond News

Beyond News
Author: Mitchell Stephens
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2014-02-04
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0231159382

For a century and a half, journalists made a good business out of selling the latest news or selling ads next to that news. Now that news pours out of the Internet and our mobile devices—fast, abundant, and mostly free—that era is ending. Our best journalists, Mitchell Stephens argues, instead must offer original, challenging perspectives—not just slightly more thorough accounts of widely reported events. His book proposes a new standard: “wisdom journalism,” an amalgam of the more rarified forms of reporting—exclusive, enterprising, investigative—and informed, insightful, interpretive, explanatory, even opinionated takes on current events. This book features an original, sometimes critical examination of contemporary journalism, both on- and offline. And it finds inspiration for a more ambitious and effective understanding of journalism in examples from twenty-first-century articles and blogs, as well as in a selection of outstanding twentieth-century journalism and Benjamin Franklin’s eighteenth-century writings. Most attempts to deal with journalism’s current crisis emphasize technology. This book emphasizes mindsets and the need to rethink what journalism has been and might become.

Principles of American Journalism

Principles of American Journalism
Author: Stephanie Craft
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2016-03-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317436458

Designed to engage, inspire and challenge students while laying out the fundamentals of the craft, Principles of American Journalism introduces readers to the core values of journalism and its singular role in a democracy. From the First Amendment to Facebook, the new and revised edition of this popular textbook provides a comprehensive exploration of the guiding principles of journalism and what makes it unique: the profession's ethical and legal foundations; its historical and modern precepts; the economic landscape of journalism; the relationships among journalism and other social institutions; the key issues and challenges that contemporary journalists face. Case studies, exercises, and an interactive companion website encourage critical thinking about journalism and its role in society, making students more mindful practitioners of journalism and more informed media consumers.

Surviving the White Gaze

Surviving the White Gaze
Author: Rebecca Carroll
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2021-02-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1982174552

A stirring and powerful memoir from black cultural critic Rebecca Carroll recounting her painful struggle to overcome a completely white childhood in order to forge her identity as a black woman in America. Rebecca Carroll grew up the only black person in her rural New Hampshire town. Adopted at birth by artistic parents who believed in peace, love, and zero population growth, her early childhood was loving and idyllic—and yet she couldn’t articulate the deep sense of isolation she increasingly felt as she grew older. Everything changed when she met her birth mother, a young white woman, who consistently undermined Carroll’s sense of her blackness and self-esteem. Carroll’s childhood became harrowing, and her memoir explores the tension between the aching desire for her birth mother’s acceptance, the loyalty she feels toward her adoptive parents, and the search for her racial identity. As an adult, Carroll forged a path from city to city, struggling along the way with difficult boyfriends, depression, eating disorders, and excessive drinking. Ultimately, through the support of her chosen black family, she was able to heal. Intimate and illuminating, Surviving the White Gaze is a timely examination of racism and racial identity in America today, and an extraordinarily moving portrait of resilience.

Deciding What’s True

Deciding What’s True
Author: Lucas Graves
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2016-09-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0231542224

Over the past decade, American outlets such as PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and the Washington Post's Fact Checker have shaken up the political world by holding public figures accountable for what they say. Cited across social and national news media, these verdicts can rattle a political campaign and send the White House press corps scrambling. Yet fact-checking is a fraught kind of journalism, one that challenges reporters' traditional roles as objective observers and places them at the center of white-hot, real-time debates. As these journalists are the first to admit, in a hyperpartisan world, facts can easily slip into fiction, and decisions about which claims to investigate and how to judge them are frequently denounced as unfair play. Deciding What's True draws on Lucas Graves's unique access to the members of the newsrooms leading this movement. Graves vividly recounts the routines of journalists at three of these hyperconnected, technologically innovative organizations and what informs their approach to a story. Graves also plots a compelling, personality-driven history of the fact-checking movement and its recent evolution from the blogosphere, reflecting on its revolutionary remaking of journalistic ethics and practice. His book demonstrates the ways these rising organizations depend on professional networks and media partnerships yet have also made inroads with the academic and philanthropic worlds. These networks have become a vital source of influence as fact-checking spreads around the world.

Bias in the Booth

Bias in the Booth
Author: Dylan Gwinn
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2015-03-02
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1621573885

Most of us see sports as a welcome—even blessed—relief from the challenges and frustrations of everyday life. We want to sit back, open a beer, and enjoy the game. But many of those who bring us the game have a different agenda—they use their broadcasting platform to harangue us with their own politically correct preoccupations. If a seventh-round NFL draft pick who can't make the team or an over-the-hill basketball player declares that he's gay, he gets wall-to-wall media coverage and is hailed as a hero. If a stripper accuses college lacrosse players of rape, liberal sports reporters lead the lynch mob—with no apologies when the bearers of "white privilege" are proved innocent. In his blistering new book Bias in the Booth, sports reporter and commentator Dylan Gwinn takes you inside the sports media spin machine to reveal what they hope you won't notice: the sports media are no different from the news and entertainment media.