Beyond News
The Future of Journalism
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- 40,99 €
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- 40,99 €
Publisher Description
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. Stephens emphasizes mindsets and the need to rethink what journalism has been and might become.
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Stephens, a professor of journalism at New York University, questions what should be next for modern journalism in the demanding digital age. He explores options for a news industry to revamp and retool, noting that journalists must "return to an older and higher view of their calling." With the Internet, the news business requires not only collecting facts and details of events, and opinionated views, but a need to practice "wisdom journalism" thoughtful judgment, insight, and informed argument which is sometimes lacking in current media. The book's astute observations, supported by historic writings of theories and principles, offer the reader various ways to approach the challenges and obstacles confronting the media's content, distribution, and quality then and now. Rather than stressing the dominance of technology, Stephens addresses the preparation, expertise, fairness, and reliability of journalists who present the information and arguments to the consumer. Stephens, not one to say he has all the answers, admits in his remarkable survey on media that "journalism can and must improve will remain vulnerable to hastiness and the passions of the moment." For information buffs, this is a feast, intelligent and candidly forthright.