1st Edition
Changing the News The Forces Shaping Journalism in Uncertain Times
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.
Foreword: Certainty and Uncertainty of Change in Journalism -- Robert Picard
Chapter 1: Complexity, Uncertainty and Journalistic Change -- Wilson Lowrey and Peter Gade
Chapter 2: Reshaping the Journalistic Culture -- Peter Gade and Wilson Lowrey
Part II: Ideology, Culture and Institutions
Chapter 3: Journalism and Democracy -- John Merrill
Chapter 4: Postmodernism, Uncertainty, and Journalism -- Peter Gade
Chapter 5: The Call and Challenge for Diversity -- George Sylvie
Chapter 6: Communities, Cultural Identity and the News -- Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez
Chapter 7: Changes in Community Power Structures -- Douglas Blanks Hindman
Chapter 8: News: Once and Future Institution? -- Wilson Lowrey
Part III: Markets, Organization and Profession
Chapter 9: Market Journalism -- Stephen Lacy and Ardyth Broadrick SohnChapter 10: The Fragmenting Mass Media Marketplace -- John Dimmick, Angela Powers, Sam Mwangi, and Elizabeth Stoycheff
Chapter 11: Changing perceptions of organizations -- C. Ann Hollifield
Chapter 12: Journalism and Digital Technologies -- Jane B. Singer
Chapter 13: "So Many Stories, So Little Time": Changing perceptions of professional roles -- Randal A. Beam and Lindsey Meeks
Chapter 14: Where professionalism begins -- Lee B. Becker and Tudor Vlad
Chapter 15: Connective Journalism -- Wilson Lowrey and Peter Gade
Biography
Wilson Lowrey is an associate professor in the College of Communication and Information Sciences at The University of Alabama. Lowrey’s research focuses on the sociology of news work, and has been published in a number of journals, including Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Political Communication, Journalism, Journalism Studies and Journal of Media Economics.
Peter J. Gade is a Gaylord Family Professor and Journalism Area Head in the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma. He is a co-author of Twilight of Press Freedom: The Rise of People’s Journalism (2001). He is a former newspaper reporter and mid-level manager and has worked as an organizational consultant for newspapers, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
