Beyond News: The Future of Journalism
Mitchell Stephens
Abstract
This book provides an original, sometimes critical, examination of contemporary journalism, both on- and offline, and proposes a new standard for journalism (wisdom journalism) that brings together the more rarified forms of reporting to provide an informed, insightful, interpretive, explanatory, and even opinionated take on current events. The book argues that, for a century and a half, journalists have made a good business out of selling the latest news or selling ads next to that news. Now that news pours out of the Internet and our mobile devices—fast, abundant, and mostly free—that era is ... More
This book provides an original, sometimes critical, examination of contemporary journalism, both on- and offline, and proposes a new standard for journalism (wisdom journalism) that brings together the more rarified forms of reporting to provide an informed, insightful, interpretive, explanatory, and even opinionated take on current events. The book argues that, for a century and a half, journalists have made a good business out of selling the latest news or selling ads next to that news. Now that news pours out of the Internet and our mobile devices—fast, abundant, and mostly free—that era is ending. Our best journalists, the book suggests, must instead offer original, challenging perspectives—not just slightly more thorough accounts of widely reported events. Most attempts to deal with journalism's current crisis emphasize technology; this book emphasizes mindsets and the need to rethink what journalism has been and might become. The book finds inspiration for a more ambitious and effective understanding of journalism in examples from twenty-first-century articles and blogs, from a selection of outstanding examples of twentieth-century journalism and from Benjamin Franklin's eighteenth-century writings.
Keywords:
wisdom journalism,
news,
Internet,
Benjamin Franklin,
contemporary journalism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780231159388 |
| Published to Columbia Scholarship Online: November 2015 |
DOI:10.7312/columbia/9780231159388.001.0001 |
