The professional judgment of gatekeepers defined the American news agenda for decades. Making the News Popular examines how subsequent events brought on a post-professional period that opened the door for imagining that consumer preferences should drive news production--and unleashed both crisis and opportunity on journalistic institutions. Anthony Nadler charts a paradigm shift, from market research's reach into the editorial suite in the 1970s through contemporary experiments in collaborative filtering and social news sites like Reddit and Digg. As Nadler shows, the transition was and is a rocky one. It also goes back much further than many experts suppose. Idealized visions of demand-driven news face obstacles with each iteration. Furthermore, the post-professional philosophy fails to recognize how organizations mobilize interest in news and public life. Nadler argues that this civic function of news organizations has been neglected in debates on the future of journalism. Only with a critical grasp of news outlets' role in stirring broad interest in democratic life, he says, might journalism's digital crisis push us toward building a more robust and democratic news media. Wide-ranging and original, Making the News Popular offers a critical examination of an important, and still evolving, media phenomenon.

Resisting the News brings together unique insights from activists and alternative-media users to offer a distinctive perspective on the problems of journalism today—and how to fix them. Using critical-cultural theory and, in particular, the conceptual frameworks of ritual communication and interpretive communities, this book examines how audiences filter their interpretations of mainstream news through the prisms of their identities and experiences with alternative media and political protest. Jennifer Rauch gives voice to alternative-media audiences and illuminates the cultural resources, values, assumptions, critical skills, and discursive strategies through which they make sense of their news environments. Drawing on a 15-year research project, Rauch employs a variety of qualitative, quantitative, and quasi-ethnographic methods, including focus groups, media-use diaries, close-ended surveys, and open-ended questions, to paint a layered portrait of liberal and conservative critiques of journalism. Shedding new light on popular theories about "how news works" and about "mass" audiences, this book will be useful to students, scholars, and teachers of political communication, journalism studies, media studies, and critical-cultural studies.

The professional judgment of gatekeepers defined the American news agenda for decades. Making the News Popular examines how subsequent events brought on a post-professional period that opened the door for imagining that consumer preferences should drive news production--and unleashed both crisis and opportunity on journalistic institutions. Anthony Nadler charts a paradigm shift, from market research's reach into the editorial suite in the 1970s through contemporary experiments in collaborative filtering and social news sites like Reddit and Digg. As Nadler shows, the transition was and is a rocky one. It also goes back much further than many experts suppose. Idealized visions of demand-driven news face obstacles with each iteration. Furthermore, the post-professional philosophy fails to recognize how organizations mobilize interest in news and public life. Nadler argues that this civic function of news organizations has been neglected in debates on the future of journalism. Only with a critical grasp of news outlets' role in stirring broad interest in democratic life, he says, might journalism's digital crisis push us toward building a more robust and democratic news media. Wide-ranging and original, Making the News Popular offers a critical examination of an important, and still evolving, media phenomenon.

Peeking inside the newsrooms where journalists create stories and the work settings where the public reads them, the author reveals why journalists contribute to the growing similarity of news and why consumers acquiesce to a media system they find increasingly dissatisfying.

Photo opportunities, ten-second sound bites, talking heads and celebrity anchors: so the world is explained daily to millions of Americans. The result, according to the experts, is an ignorant public, helpless targets of a one-way flow of carefully filtered and orchestrated communication. Common Knowledge shatters this pervasive myth. Reporting on a ground-breaking study, the authors reveal that our shared knowledge and evolving political beliefs are determined largely by how we actively reinterpret the images, fragments, and signals we find in the mass media. For their study, the authors analyzed coverage of 150 television and newspaper stories on five prominent issues—drugs, AIDS, South African apartheid, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the stock market crash of October 1987. They tested audience responses of more than 1,600 people, and conducted in-depth interviews with a select sample. What emerges is a surprisingly complex picture of people actively and critically interpreting the news, making sense of even the most abstract issues in terms of their own lives, and finding political meaning in a sophisticated interplay of message, medium, and firsthand experience. At every turn, Common Knowledge refutes conventional wisdom. It shows that television is far more effective at raising the saliency of issues and promoting learning than is generally assumed; it also undermines the assumed causal connection between newspaper reading and higher levels of political knowledge. Finally, this book gives a deeply responsible and thoroughly fascinating account of how the news is conveyed to us, and how we in turn convey it to others, making meaning of at once so much and so little. For anyone who makes the news—or tries to make anything of it—Common Knowledge promises uncommon wisdom.

Post-liberalisation India has witnessed a dramatic growth of the television industry as well as on-screen images of the glitz and glamour of a vibrant, ‘shining’ India. Through a detailed ethnographic study of Star News and Star Ananda involving interviews, observations and content analysis, this book explores the milieu of 24-hour private news channels in India today. It offers insightful glimpses into the workings of one of the mightiest news corporations in the world and its ability to manufacture everyday reality for its audiences. Based on fieldwork in Mumbai and Kolkata, this study not only provides a detailed description of the television newsroom, its rituals and rhythms, but ventures beyond it to investigate how editorial and corporate strategies converge increasingly in an industry driven by profit. Through analysing how TRPs work to produce a non-inclusive idea of the ‘audience’ and examining hundreds of hours of news content, the book explores how news channels construct a vision of nationhood and of a successful and vibrant economy that caters primarily to the needs of the resurgent Indian middle class. While it will be of particular interest to media and cultural studies scholars and students, and to journalists and media professionals in general, this lively, engaging book also aims to give the general reader the wherewithal to analyse and critique the continuous barrage of 24-hour news television today.

Making News: A Straight-Shooting Guide to Media Relations is an insider's look at today's changing news media with essential tips for: How to ensure your story will be chosen as today's news How to gain credibility and achieve effective coverage How to better communicate with reporters, editors and producers How to use media coverage to build a distinctive brand image From the perspective of an accomplished expert and with advice from leading journalists, Making News provides a deeper understanding of how the news business functions, how journalists judge the value of a legitimate story and how you can communicate with the media to achieve outstanding results. PRAISE FOR DAVID HENDERSON "Public relations is never as easy as it looks. So you are lucky to be reading this book, for few know PR as well as David Henderson. A skilled correspondent and a gifted man, David knows both sides of the process of delivering a message." -Harry Smith CBS News "David Henderson has worked both sides of the street-as a reporter and an advocate. He has that double advantage of knowing a story and knowing how to sell it." -Richard Serrano Los Angeles Times

Many believe the solution to ongoing crises in the news industry--including profound financial instability and public distrust--is for journalists to improve their relationship with their audiences. This raises important questions: How do journalists conceptualize their audiences in the first place? What is the connection between what journalists think about their audiences and what they do to reach them? Perhaps most importantly, how aligned are these "imagined" audiences with the real ones? Imagined Audiences draws on ethnographic case studies of three news organizations to reveal how journalists' assumptions about their audiences shape their approaches to their audiences. Jacob L. Nelson examines the role that audiences have traditionally played in journalism, how that role has changed, and what those changes mean for both the profession and the public. He concludes by drawing on audience studies research to compare journalism's "imagined" audiences with actual observations of news audience behavior. The result is a comprehensive study of both news production and reception at a moment when the relationship between the two has grown more important than ever before.