Why American Newspapers Gave Away the Future

Why American Newspapers Gave Away the Future
Author: Richard Tofel
Publisher: Now and Then Reader LLC
Total Pages: 33
Release: 2012-02-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 193785311X

As the internet mushroomed in the 1990s and information became technologically omnipresent, one traditional source of news and analysis began to flounder: the great American newspaper. In the last two decades the decline of large city papers in the United States has been precipitous and shocking. The reasons behind this fall are still not clearly understood, particularly by those within the newspaper industry. The newspapers' response to their problems has also been called into question, especially the dilution of content and the reduction of staffs. And there is growing concern that a democratic republic without a vigorous press augurs poorly for an informed electorate and a healthy society. Richard Tofel's considerable experience as a newspaper executive gives his assessment of these events an insider's perspective. His piece is filled with fresh insights and astute conclusions.

The Future of Newspapers

The Future of Newspapers
Author: Bob Franklin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317990544

The future of newspapers is hotly contested. Pessimistic pundits predict their imminent demise while others envisage a new era of participatory journalism online, with yet others advocating increased investment "in quality journalism" rather than free gifts and DVDs, as the necessary cure for the current parlous state of newspapers. Globally, newspapers confront highly variable prospects reflecting their location in different market sectors, countries and journalism cultures. But despite this diversity, they face similar challenges in responding to the increased competition from expansive radio and 24 hour television news channels; the emergence of free "Metro" papers; the delivery of news services on billboards, pod casts and mobile telephony; the development of online editions, as well as the burgeoning of blogs, citizen journalists and User Generated Content. Newspapers’ revenue streams are also under attack as advertising increasingly migrates online. This authoritative collection of research based essays by distinguished scholars and journalists from around the globe, brings together a judicious mix of academic expertise and professional journalistic experience to analyse and report on the future of newspapers. This book was published as special issues of Journalism Practice and Journalism Studies.

We the Media

We the Media
Author: Dan Gillmor
Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2006-01-24
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0596102275

Looks at the emerging phenomenon of online journalism, including Weblogs, Internet chat groups, and email, and how anyone can produce news.

News for the Rich, White, and Blue

News for the Rich, White, and Blue
Author: Nikki Usher
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0231545606

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.

Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. The Media After Trump

Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. The Media After Trump
Author: Andrey Mir
Publisher: Independently Published
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2020-10-05
Genre:
ISBN:

Media business that mostly relies on ad revenue requires an audience that consists of happy and economically able consumers. Media business that mostly relies on reader revenue requires an audience that consists of frustrated and politically strangulated citizens. The media not only address these audiences; they create and reproduce them.All we knew about journalism was related to a news business funded by advertising. Advertising has fled to the internet. The entire media environment is shifting. The media are forced to switch to another source of funding - selling content to readers. However, they cannot sell news, because news is already known to people whose media consumption is increasingly centered on social media newsfeeds. Instead, the media offers the validation of already-known news within a certain value system and the delivery of the "right" news to others. The business necessity forces the media to relocate the gravity of their operation from news to values.Media outlets are increasingly soliciting subscriptions as donations to a cause. To attract donations, they have to focus on 'pressing social issues'. However, for better soliciting, they must also support and amplify readers' irritation and frustration with those issues. Thus, the media are incentivized to amplify and dramatize issues whose coverage is most likely to be paid for. Ideally, the media should not just exaggerate but induce the public's concerns.The ad-driven media manufactured consent. The reader-driven media manufactures anger. The former served consumerism. The latter serves polarization.Because the largest mainstream media outlets in the US, both liberal and conservative, performed incredibly well in commodifying Trump in the form of soliciting subscriptions as donations to the cause, the rest of the media market has started moving in the same direction.The need to pursue reader revenue, with the news no longer being a commodity, is pushing journalism to mutate into postjournalism. Journalism wants its picture to match the world; postjournalism wants the world to match its picture. The media are turning into crowdsourced Ministries of post-truth not because of some underlying conspiracies but due to their business needs and the settings of a broader media environment. This book is about the origins and propelling forces of this mutation. The book explores polarization as a media effect, seeing polarization studies as media studies.Andrey Mir (Andrey Miroshnichenko) is a media scholar and journalist with twenty years in the print media. He is the author of "Human as Media. The Emancipation of Authorship" (2014) and a number of books on media and politics. His dissertation in journalism and linguistics (1996) focused on the linguistics of the Soviet media and propaganda. He lives in Toronto, Canada. His blog: Human as Media (human-as-media.com). Twitter: @Andrey4Mir

The Vanishing Newspaper [2nd Ed]

The Vanishing Newspaper [2nd Ed]
Author: Philip Meyer
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2009-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 082621858X

"In this edition, Meyer's analysis of the correlation between newspaper quality and profitability is updated and applied to recent developments in the newspaper industry. Meyer argues that understanding the relationship between quality and profit is central to sustaining journalistic excellence and preserving journalism's unique social functions." -- Provided by the publisher.

The Expanding News Desert

The Expanding News Desert
Author: Penelope Muse Abernathy
Publisher: Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Total Pages: 104
Release: 2018-11-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781469653242

This report delves into the implications for communities at risk of losing their primary source of credible news. By documenting the shifting news landscape and evaluating the threat of media deserts, this report seeks to raise awareness of the role interested parties can play in addressing the challenges confronting local news and democracy. The Expanding News Desert documents the continuing loss of papers and readers, the consolidation in the industry, and the social, political and economic consequences for thousands of communities throughout the country. It also provides an update on the strategies of the seven large investment firms--hedge and pension funds, as well as private and publicly traded equity groups--that swooped in to purchase hundreds of newspapers in recent years and explores the indelible mark they have left on the newspaper industry during a time of immense disruption.

The Future of Journalism

The Future of Journalism
Author: Bob Franklin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1317985710

The future of journalism is hotly contested and highly uncertain reflecting developments in media technologies, shifting business strategies for online news, changing media organisational and regulatory structures, the fragmentation of audiences and a growing public concern about some aspects of tabloid journalism practices and reporting, as well as broader political, sociological and cultural changes. These developments have combined to impoverish the flow of existing revenues available to fund journalism, impact radically on traditional journalism professional practices, while simultaneously generating an increasingly frenzied search for sustainable and equivalent funding – and from a wide range of sources - to nurture and deliver quality journalism in the future. This book brings together journalists and distinguished academic specialists from around the globe to present the findings from their research and to discuss the future of journalism, the shifting quality of its products, its wide ranging sources of finance, as well as the economic and democratic consequences of the significant changes confronting Journalism. The Future of Journalism details the challenges facing the press in contemporary societies and provides essential reading for everyone interested in the role of journalism in shaping and sustaining literate, civil and democratic societies. This book consists of special issues from Journalism Studies and Journalism Practice.

Out of Print

Out of Print
Author: George Brock
Publisher: Kogan Page Publishers
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2013-09-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0749466529

News and journalism are in the midst of upheaval: shifts such as declining print subscriptions and rising website visitor numbers are forcing assumptions and practices to be rethought from first principles. The internet is not simply allowing faster, wider distribution of material: digital technology is demanding transformative change. Out of Print analyzes the role and influence of newspapers in the digital age and explains how current theory and practice have to change to fully exploit developing opportunities. In Out of Print George Brock guides readers through the history, present state and future of journalism, highlighting how and why journalism needs to be rethought on a global scale and remade to meet the demands and opportunities of new conditions. He provides a unique examination of every key issue, from the phone-hacking scandal and Leveson Inquiry to the impact of social media on news and expectations. He presents an incisive, authoritative analysis of the role and influence of journalism in the digital age. Online supporting resources for this book include downloadable lecture slides.

Local Journalism

Local Journalism
Author: Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2015-06-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0857726560

For more than a century, local journalism has been taken almost for granted. But the twenty-first century has brought major challenges. The newspaper industry that has historically provided most local coverage is in decline and it is not yet clear whether digital media will sustain new forms of local journalism. This book provides an international overview of the challenges facing changing forms of local journalism today. It identifies the central role that diminished newspapers still play in local media ecosystems, analyses relations between local journalists and politicians, government officials, community activists and ordinary citizens, and examines the uneven rise of new forms of digital local journalism. Together, the chapters present a multi-faceted portrait of the precarious present and uncertain future of local journalism in the Western world.