When Mbas Rule The Newsroom

Writing with anger but with a deep affection for the trade, he examines the growing economic pressures within the industry, the roots of the managerial revolution, and the impact of marketplace journalism on the operation of the newsroom and employee morale.

The news media are often seen as a fourth branch of government, serving as a check on the other three. This text argues that this is a mistaken notion: the media's decisions affect the government's policy making, as well as the processes and outcomes of the political system.

The concept of boundaries has become a central theme in the study of journalism. In recent years, the decline of legacy news organizations and the rise of new interactive media tools have thrust such questions as "what is journalism" and "who is a journalist" into the limelight. Struggles over journalism are often struggles over boundaries. These symbolic contests for control over definition also mark a material struggle over resources. In short: boundaries have consequences. Yet there is a lack of conceptual cohesiveness in what scholars mean by the term "boundaries" or in how we should think about specific boundaries of journalism. This book addresses boundaries head-on by bringing together a global array of authors asking similar questions about boundaries and journalism from a diverse range of perspectives, methodologies, and theoretical backgrounds. Boundaries of Journalism assembles the most current research on this topic in one place, thus providing a touchstone for future research within communication, media and journalism studies on journalism and its boundaries.

Newspapers: A Lost Cause? describes the recent history of newspaper firms in the United States and The Netherlands, and attempts to assess the chances of survival of the printed newspaper. The changing competitive media landscape and the challenges of today's newspaper organisations, including the impact of the Internet on the news industry, are described and analysed. The author argues that although the printed newspaper will not be replaced overnight by (new) competing media, the traditional business model of newspapers is being eroded slowly but steadily. A healthy newspaper industry and prospering newspaper firms can only exist, if management - including journalists and marketeers - focus their attention on changing the newspaper organisation and capitalise more intensively on its core assets and skills.

The professional judgment of gatekeepers defined the American news agenda for decades. Making the News Popular examines how subsequent events brought on a post-professional period that opened the door for imagining that consumer preferences should drive news production--and unleashed both crisis and opportunity on journalistic institutions. Anthony Nadler charts a paradigm shift, from market research's reach into the editorial suite in the 1970s through contemporary experiments in collaborative filtering and social news sites like Reddit and Digg. As Nadler shows, the transition was and is a rocky one. It also goes back much further than many experts suppose. Idealized visions of demand-driven news face obstacles with each iteration. Furthermore, the post-professional philosophy fails to recognize how organizations mobilize interest in news and public life. Nadler argues that this civic function of news organizations has been neglected in debates on the future of journalism. Only with a critical grasp of news outlets' role in stirring broad interest in democratic life, he says, might journalism's digital crisis push us towards building a more robust and democratic news media.

The emergence of giant media corporations has created a new era in mass communications. The world of media giants—with a focus on the bottom line—makes awareness of business and financial issues critical for everyone in the industry. This timely new edition of a popular and successful textbook introduces basic business concepts, terminology, history, and management theories in the context of contemporary events. It includes up-to-date information on technology and addresses the major problem facing media companies today: How can the news regain profitability in the digital age? Focusing on newspaper, television, and radio companies, Herrick fills his book with real-life examples, interviews with media managers, and case studies. In a time when all the rules are changing because of digital technology, conglomeration, and shifting consumer habits, this text is a vital tool for students and working journalists.

Who are U.S. journalists? What are their backgrounds and educational experiences? Why did they choose journalism as an occupation? What do they think about their work? What are their professional and ethical values? What kinds of work do they consider their best? Do men differ from women on these questions? Do ethnic and racial minorities differ from the majority? Do journalists working for different print and broadcast news media differ? This book uses findings from the most comprehensive and representative study ever done of the demographic and educational backgrounds, working conditions, and professional and ethical values of 1,410 U.S. print and broadcast journalists working in the 1990s to answer these questions, including separate analyses for women and minority news people. It also compares many of these findings with those from the major studies of the early 1970s and 1980s. As such, it should be the standard reference on U.S. journalists for years to come. In addition, this study goes beyond the previous two in adding more open-ended questions to explain and enrich quantitative findings, in the belief that the numbers by themselves are not enough to provide explanations for the patterns that emerge. This book includes more of the journalists' own words to fill this gap, as well as an analysis of samples of their self-selected best work.

Between the 1970s and the 1990s American journalists began telling the news by telling stories. They borrowed narrative techniques, transforming sources into characters, events into plots, and their own work from stenography to anthropology. This was more than a change in style. It was a change in substance, a paradigmatic shift in terms of what constituted news and how it was being told. It was a turn toward narrative journalism and a new culture of news, propelled by the storytelling movement. Thomas Schmidt analyzes the expansion of narrative journalism and the corresponding institutional changes in the American newspaper industry in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In doing so, he offers the first institutionally situated history of narrative journalism’s evolution from the New Journalism of the 1960s to long-form literary journalism in the 1990s. Based on the analysis of primary sources, industry publications, and oral history interviews, this study traces how narrative techniques developed and spread through newsrooms, advanced by institutional initiatives and a growing network of practitioners, proponents, and writing coaches who mainstreamed the use of storytelling. Challenging the popular belief that it was only a few talented New York reporters (Tome Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and others) who revolutionized journalism by deciding to employ storytelling techniques in their writing, Schmidt shows that the evolution of narrative in late twentieth century American Journalism was more nuanced, more purposeful, and more institutionally based than the New Journalism myth suggests.