The News Media – What Everyone Needs to Know

I commented just a few months ago on the very helpful series: “What Everyone Needs to Know” from Oxford University Press.  This week, they are releasing The News Media and given the election season that seems very timely, especially due to sections titled “Who pays for the news today?” or “What about ethnic and other non-English language media?” and “How will the relationship between journalism and democracy change in the future?”

The authors are obviously reputable and very accomplished in the field: C.W. Anderson, Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island (CUNY); Leonard Downie, Jr., former executive editor of The Washington Post and currently Professor of Journalism at Arizona State; and Michael Schudson, author and Professor at Columbia University. I have already ordered a copy of The News Media – What Everyone Needs to Know and will certainly share it with our journalism teachers because of the valuable information and many prompts for discussion it contains. 

The authors note that American journalism is in a “state of great turmoil and uncertainty” and discuss how digital technology has “destabilized news organizations that had long produced most of the news and set journalistic standards.” The News Media contains statistics about the changing number of journalists and potential impacts of social media and citizen journalism. Looking at the past present and future, the authors also probe more philosophically, asking, for example, about the role of objectivity in reporting or whether the storytelling function of journalism is just going to disappear. Employing a question and answer format and covering a wide range of issues, this title is a very useful addition to the What Everyone Needs to Know series.