The Business of News: a Challenge for Journalism’s Next Generation
Carnegie Corporation of New York | 2008 | ISBN: 2008342206 | English | PDF | 70 pages | 1 MB
American journalists have a major responsibility: working on democracy’s free press to inform citizens and officials about local, national and world events as well as to provide a measure of public accountability for all institutions and their members. In June 2002, a number of prominent journalists, publishers, news executives and deans of journalism and communications schools came to a daylong Carnegie Corporation forum to discuss a concern raised by many of us; namely, that the nation’s truly admirable journalism profession currently lacks sufficient tools to do its work—and, hence, democracy’s work—in a competitive environment of parsimonious corporate support and expanding global complexity.
Globalization imposes on journalists the increasing burden of making sense of interlocking or interdependent histories, economies, laws, cultures and conflicts in a “news cycle” now spinning at Internet speed. The Information Revolution—and journalists are front and center in this revolution—makes it enormously easier for journalists to obtain information, but not correspondingly easier for them to separate the chaff from the wheat, subjectivity from objectivity, opinion from fact, private interests from public interests, manipulation from influence and corruption from “spin.” The Information Revolution, globalization and media industry trends—including corporate consolidations, ever-present commercialism and “infotainment”—make it more and more difficult for journalists to cover the news and provide sophisticated analysis, synthesis and context.
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