Popular books on the state of news
We’ve wondered whether textbooks are up to date. What about popular books? Former journalists from prestigious news organizations write them regularly. Some may be out of date; others, not. Ask students to look up the following books online and pick questions to answer from one of the bundles below.
The books:
- 2001 – The Elements of Journalism, by Bill Kovach, former editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Tom Rosenstiel, former media reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
- 2001 – Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering, edited by Gene Roberts, former managing editor of The New York Times.
- 2003 – The News about the News: American Journalism in Peril, by Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser, former editor and managing editor of the Washington Post, respectively.
- 2009 – Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy, by Alex Jones, former New York Times media reporter.
The questions:
Flashlight: How popular are these books? Which ranks highest on Amazon.com? Browse the contents or reviews online. Do the books have common themes? Have you read any of them? Would you want to? Why or why not?
Spotlight: Why are experienced journalists from major newspapers considered authoritative voices on journalism? Do we look to metropolitan papers for more or better original journalism than television or others in the news ecosystem? Review the Support Reporting video at the web site of the Columbia Journalism Review. Do you agree with the video’s point that local journalism is in trouble in America? Why or why not?
Searchlight: The authors of the books above all are men who rose to the tops of the same types of newspapers. They are of the same generation, race and class. Consider the idea by Robert C. Maynard, former editor and publisher of The Oakland Tribune, that a person’s view of the world is influenced by the social fault lines of gender, race, generation, geography and class. You can find it at the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. If these books had been written by younger writers, or women, or journalists of color, or reporters from rural America, would they have contained different themes?