Further Reading | Journalism in the Digital Age

McChesney, R. W., & Nichols, J. (2010). The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again (1st ed.). Nation Books.: This book presents journalism at a tipping point in American history — one that is deeply affected by changes in technology. This tipping point could go toward a dystopia that includes the corporate and political elite dictating the dialogue, but simply on a new medium, or it could go toward a real chance at a kind of citizen journalism relatively unknown in American history. It also details the crisis in pint journalism, the value of journalism to democracy, and contains appendices about the history of journalism in America.
Carlyle, T. (1966). On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (6th ed.). University of Nebraska Press.: It is in this book that the notion “fourth estate” was used in the context that is often incorrectly attributed to the statesman Edmund Burke. Carlyle calls the press the inevitable effect of a society that embraced writing, and a force that would inevitably push civilizations to democracy. In the process, he brings in the processions for the protection of free speech that is so vital to journalism: “The nation is governed by all that has tongue in the nation: Democracy is virtually there.” In this lens, Carlyle argues, the hero is the man of letters.
Harcup, T. (2006). The Ethical Journalist (New edition.). Sage Publications Ltd.: This book covers journalism’s role in shaping society’s knowledge and opinions of issues. It discusses ethical issues surrounding quoting sources, reporting on crime, and regulating journalism. It also reprints, in appendices, the International Federation of Journalists Code of Conduct, the National Union of Journalists Code of Conduct, the National Union of Journalists Guidelines on Race Reporting, and extracts from the Ofcom Broadcasting Code.
O’Reilly, T. (2007). What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. Communications and Strategies, 65, 17.: This paper ventures seven core competencies that Web 2.0 companies have to have, and in this process, it defines more precisely the notion of Web 2.0. The article compares the remnants of Web 1.0 technologies (DoubleClick, Akamai, and Britannica Online) with new Web 2.0 things that have taken their place on the web (Google AdSense, BitTorrent, and Wikipedia, respectively). Part of the article also are small case studies of Web 2.0 companies and their 1.0 counterparts. In the process of comparing companies and business models of companies like Google and Netscape, for instance, O’Reilly applies his core competencies of Web 2.0 technologies to separate them from companies of the past.
Ed. Paterson, Chris and David Domingo (2008). Making Online News. Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.: This book contains case studies (of the Irish Times and Clarín, an Argentinian newspaper) that examines how journalistic practices are adapted when a newspaper opens an online operation.
King, Elliot (2010). Free for All: The Internet’s Transformation of Journalism. Northwestern University Press.: King discusses the inextricability of medium from message and the effect of internet culture on internet journalism. It describes the history of technological changes in news distribution and how these changes affected the content of news media.
PBS. (n.d.). Charlie Rose – Emanuel Cleaver, Laura Richardson, Arianna Huffington, Thomas Curley, Robert Morgenthau.: This Charlie Rose interview pits Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington Post, and Thomas Curley, the CEO of the Associated Press. In the process, it encapsulates the fight between the financial models of old media on one side, where the AP argues that information that is costly to discover needs to be protected, and the new media on the other, where the Huffington Post decries the building of proprietary boundaries to protect content.
Clifford, S. (2009, April 8). Magazines Blur Line Between Ad and Article. The New York Times.: This New York Times article examines cases in modern print journalism where the desperation of modern publications led to them crossing the line between editorializing and advertising. The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) has been the arbiter of this line, and has recently had to exclude Scholastic Parent & Child from their awards because of the publication’s cover ads. In other cases, it is not sure whether the line has been crossed too far into advertising. Entertainment Weekly recently had a 3-page pullout on the inside of their cover; ESPN recently published a cover with a tagline of an ad. Organizations have been tempted to experiment with ads like these to manage their budgets, and the only power ASME has against them is an exclusion from their awards.
Tuchman, G. (1973). Making news by doing work: Routinizing the unexpected. The American Journal of Sociology, 79(1), 110–131.: This 1973 study attempts to analyze how news organizations can process unexpected events. The age of the study makes it a great analysis of the way ‘old’ media worked. Its argument: the classifications between hard and soft news, spot news and developing stories, help make the industry more agile in responding to unexpected events, but also reduce the raw material available on the news and typify events based on the category they fall into.
Bromley, R. V., & Bowles, D. (1995). Impact of Internet on Use of Traditional News Media. Newspaper Research Journal, 16(2), 14-27.: This study comes from a period of time that bridges new media and old media, because it was in the year 1995 that the Internet began to be opened up for public use through the development of browsers like Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. The study analyzed the users of Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV), an online community founded for the town of Blacksburg in 1991 by Virginia Tech University. Its main finding was that the users of BEV didn’t substitute the Internet for more traditional media sources, which is an interesting result in the dawn of the net.
Willnat, L. (n.d.). The Impact of Internet News Consumption on Mass Media Use. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Dresden International Congress Centre, Dresden, Germany: This study tracks the impact of news-gathering time spent on the Internet in 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004 though a nationally representative telephone survey. It finds that instead of replacing their traditional news media use, heavy Internet users actually supplement their time on the Internet with traditional news sources. Interestingly, this report concedes that “audiences for traditional news sources such as television and newspapers have dwindled during the past decade, [but] more and more Americans turn to Internet sources for news” (1) but at the same time, it concludes with the statement that “the consumption of Internet news is likely to not decrease but rather boost the time spend with traditional news sources” (12). The author never really reconciles these two statements, and they seem to be ill-fitting.
Stoneman, P. (2008). Exploring Time Use. Information, Communication & Society, 11(5), 617–639.: This British study used the Home Online (HoL) dataset to track people’s use of time with and without Internet usage. It was found that the Internet had some harmful effects with regard to social bonding and relations to the outside world, but had some counter-intuitive effects with regard to newspaper reading (eg Internet usage was correlated with increased use of newspapers). In this manner, the Internet partially replicates the effect TV had on our society a generation ago (it was an isolating leisure activity), but also is different because it has positive effects on traditional media use.
Federal Trade Commission (June 15th 2010). Potential Policy Recommendations to Support the Reinvention of Journalism.: Starting in December of 2009, the Federal Trade Commission held a series of workshops discussing the question, “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” Before the most recent workshop, they released this paper which discusses how journalism has changed due to the internet as well as possible solutions to the decreasing revenue, staff downsizing and other problems that have affected the journalistic profession since the rise of the internet. The paper focuses on four possible policy recommendations to aid journalism: changing copyright law to allow for more protection of journalistic work; modifying antitrust law to allow for easier collaboration amongst different media companies; using subsidies, tax breaks and other economic incentives to decrease costs; or employing new technology to reduce costs while increasing journalists’ output and value.