Changing the News examines the difficulties in changing news processes and practices in response to the evolving circumstances and struggles of the journalism industry. The editors have put together this volume to demonstrate why the prescriptions employed to salvage the journalism industry to date haven’t worked, and to explain how constraints and pressures have influenced the field’s responses to challenges in an uncertain, changing environment. If journalism is to adjust and thrive, the following questions need answers: Why do journalists and news organizations respond to uncertainties in the ways they do? What forces and structures constrain these responses? What social and cultural contexts should we take into account when we judge whether or not journalism successfully responds and adapts? The book tackles these questions from varying perspectives and levels of analysis, through chapters by scholars of news sociology and media management. Changing the News details the forces that shape and challenge journalism and journalistic culture, and explains why journalists and their organizations respond to troubles, challenges and uncertainties in the way they do.

This book offers a comprehensive portrait of French and American journalists in action as they grapple with how to report and comment on one of the most important issues of our era. Drawing on interviews with leading journalists and analyses of an extensive sample of newspaper and television coverage since the early 1970s, Rodney Benson shows how the immigration debate has become increasingly focused on the dramatic, emotion-laden frames of humanitarianism and public order. In both countries, less commercialized media tend to offer the most in-depth, multi-perspective and critical news. Benson challenges classic liberalism's assumptions about state intervention's chilling effects on the press, suggests costs as well as benefits to the current vogue in personalized narrative news, and calls attention to journalistic practices that can help empower civil society. This book offers new theories and methods for sociologists and media scholars and fresh insights for journalists, policy makers and concerned citizens.

Just a decade after the first printing press arrived in Honolulu in 1820, American Protestant missionaries produced the first newspaper in the islands. More than a thousand daily, weekly, or monthly papers in nine different languages have appeared since then. Today they are often considered a secondary source of information, but in their heyday Hawai‘i’s newspapers formed one of the most diversified, vigorous, and influential presses in the world. In this original and timely work, Helen Geracimos Chapin charts the role Hawai‘i’s newspapers played in shaping major historic events in the islands and how the rise of the newspaper abetted the rise of American influence in Hawai‘i. Shaping History is based on a wide selection of written and oral sources, including extensive interviews with journalists and others working in the newspaper industry. Students of journalism and Hawaiian history will find this comprehensive history of Hawai‘i’s newspapers especially valuable.

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

That market forces drive the news is not news. Whether a story appears in print, on television, or on the Internet depends on who is interested, its value to advertisers, the costs of assembling the details, and competitors' products. But in All the News That's Fit to Sell, economist James Hamilton shows just how this happens. Furthermore, many complaints about journalism--media bias, soft news, and pundits as celebrities--arise from the impact of this economic logic on news judgments. This is the first book to develop an economic theory of news, analyze evidence across a wide range of media markets on how incentives affect news content, and offer policy conclusions. Media bias, for instance, was long a staple of the news. Hamilton's analysis of newspapers from 1870 to 1900 reveals how nonpartisan reporting became the norm. A hundred years later, some partisan elements reemerged as, for example, evening news broadcasts tried to retain young female viewers with stories aimed at their (Democratic) political interests. Examination of story selection on the network evening news programs from 1969 to 1998 shows how cable competition, deregulation, and ownership changes encouraged a shift from hard news about politics toward more soft news about entertainers. Hamilton concludes by calling for lower costs of access to government information, a greater role for nonprofits in funding journalism, the development of norms that stress hard news reporting, and the defining of digital and Internet property rights to encourage the flow of news. Ultimately, this book shows that by more fully understanding the economics behind the news, we will be better positioned to ensure that the news serves the public good.

The concept of boundaries has become a central theme in the study of journalism. In recent years, the decline of legacy news organizations and the rise of new interactive media tools have thrust such questions as "what is journalism" and "who is a journalist" into the limelight. Struggles over journalism are often struggles over boundaries. These symbolic contests for control over definition also mark a material struggle over resources. In short: boundaries have consequences. Yet there is a lack of conceptual cohesiveness in what scholars mean by the term "boundaries" or in how we should think about specific boundaries of journalism. This book addresses boundaries head-on by bringing together a global array of authors asking similar questions about boundaries and journalism from a diverse range of perspectives, methodologies, and theoretical backgrounds. Boundaries of Journalism assembles the most current research on this topic in one place, thus providing a touchstone for future research within communication, media and journalism studies on journalism and its boundaries.

Covering the Body (the title refers to the charge given journalists to follow a president) is a powerful reassessment of the media's role in shaping our collective memory of the assassination--at the same time as it used the assassination coverage to legitimize its own role as official interpreter of American reality. Of the more than fifty reporters covering Kennedy in Dallas, no one actually saw the assassination. And faced with a monumentally important story that was continuously breaking, most journalists had no time to verify leads or substantiate reports. Rather, they took discrete moments of their stories and turned them into one coherent narrative, blurring what was and was not "professional" about their coverage.

Tracks power, privilege, and processes of community trust building in digitized media ecologies, focusing on public dialogues about racial inequality.

The New News Reports of the death of the news media are highly premature, though you wouldn't know it from the media's own headlines. Ken Doctor goes far beyond those headlines, taking an authoritative look at the fast-emerging future. The Twelve Laws of Newsonomics reveal the kinds of news that readers will get and that journalists (and citizens) will produce as we enter the first truly digital news decade. A new Digital Dozen, global powerhouses from The New York Times, News Corp, and CNN to NBC, the BBC, and NPR will dominate news across the globe, Locally, a colorful assortment of emerging news players, from Boston to San Diego, are rewriting the rules of city reporting, Newsonomics provides a new sense of the news we'll get on paper, on screen, on the phone, by blog, by podcast, and via Facebook and Twitter. It also offers a new way to understand the why and how of the changes, and where the Googles, Yahoos and Microsofts fit in. Newsonomics pays special attention to media and journalism students in a chapter on the back-to-the-future skills they'll need, while marketing professionals get their own view of what the changes mean to them.