Download or read book Democracy s Detectives written by James T. Hamilton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-10 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government Winner of the Tankard Book Award, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Winner of the Frank Luther Mott–Kappa Tau Alpha Journalism & Mass Communication Research Award In democratic societies, investigative journalism holds government and private institutions accountable to the public. From firings and resignations to changes in budgets and laws, the impact of this reporting can be significant—but so too are the costs. As newspapers confront shrinking subscriptions and advertising revenue, who is footing the bill for journalists to carry out their essential work? Democracy’s Detectives puts investigative journalism under a magnifying glass to clarify the challenges and opportunities facing news organizations today. “Hamilton’s book presents a thoughtful and detailed case for the indispensability of investigative journalism—and just at the time when we needed it. Now more than ever, reporters can play an essential role as society’s watchdogs, working to expose corruption, greed, and injustice of the years to come. For this reason, Democracy’s Detectives should be taken as both a call to arms and a bracing reminder, for readers and journalists alike, of the importance of the profession.” —Anya Schiffrin, The Nation “A highly original look at exactly what the subtitle promises...Has this topic ever been more important than this year?” —Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

Download or read book Investigative Journalism Democracy and the Digital Age written by Andrea Carson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-01 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theoretically grounded and using quantitative data spanning more than 50 years together with qualitative research, this book examines investigative journalism’s role in liberal democracies in the past and in the digital age. In its ideal form, investigative reporting provides a check on power in society and therefore can strengthen democratic accountability. The capacity is important to address now because the political and economic environment for journalism has changed substantially in recent decades. In particular, the commercialization of the Internet has disrupted the business model of traditional media outlets and the ways news content is gathered and disseminated. Despite these disruptions, this book’s central aim is to demonstrate using empirical research that investigative journalism is not in fact in decline in developed economies, as is often feared.

Download or read book Democracy Without Journalism written by Victor Pickard and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-12-02 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As local media institutions collapse and news deserts sprout up across the country, the US is facing a profound journalism crisis. Meanwhile, continuous revelations about the role that major media outlets--from Facebook to Fox News--play in the spread of misinformation have exposed deep pathologies in American communication systems. Despite these threats to democracy, policy responses have been woefully inadequate. In Democracy Without Journalism? Victor Pickard argues that we're overlooking the core roots of the crisis. By uncovering degradations caused by run-amok commercialism, he brings into focus the historical antecedents, market failures, and policy inaction that led to the implosion of commercial journalism and the proliferation of misinformation through both social media and mainstream news. The problem isn't just the loss of journalism or irresponsibility of Facebook, but the very structure upon which our profit-driven media system is built. The rise of a "misinformation society" is symptomatic of historical and endemic weaknesses in the American media system tracing back to the early commercialization of the press in the 1800s. While professionalization was meant to resolve tensions between journalism's public service and profit imperatives, Pickard argues that it merely camouflaged deeper structural maladies. Journalism has always been in crisis. The market never supported the levels of journalism--especially local, international, policy, and investigative reporting--that a healthy democracy requires. Today these long-term defects have metastasized. In this book, Pickard presents a counter-narrative that shows how the modern journalism crisis stems from media's historical over-reliance on advertising revenue, the ascendance of media monopolies, and a lack of public oversight. He draws attention to the perils of monopoly control over digital infrastructures and the rise of platform monopolies, especially the "Facebook problem." He looks to experiments from the Progressive and New Deal Eras--as well as public media models around the world--to imagine a more reliable and democratic information system. The book envisions what a new kind of journalism might look like, emphasizing the need for a publicly owned and democratically governed media system. Amid growing scrutiny of unaccountable monopoly control over media institutions and concerns about the consequences to democracy, now is an opportune moment to address fundamental flaws in US news and information systems and push for alternatives. Ultimately, the goal is to reinvent journalism.

Download or read book After Democracy written by Zizi Papacharissi and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do ordinary citizens really want from their governments? Democracy has long been considered an ideal state of governance. What if it’s not? Perhaps it is not the end goal but, rather, a transition stage to something better. Drawing on original interviews conducted with citizens of more than thirty countries, Zizi Papacharissi explores what democracy is, what it means to be a citizen, and what can be done to enhance governance. As she probes the ways governments can better serve their citizens and evolve in positive ways, Papacharissi gives a voice to everyday people, whose ideas and experiences of capitalism, media, and education can help shape future governing practices. This book expands on the well-known difficulties of realizing the intimacy of democracy in a global world—the “democratic paradox”—and presents a concrete vision of how communications technologies can be harnessed to implement representative equality, information equality, and civic literacy.

Download or read book Antimonopoly and American Democracy written by Crane and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-20 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans today worry about concentrated power in private industry to an extent not seen in generations. Not only do they find diminished diversity of service-providers and producers, but they are disquieted by the power of a few large companies to shape and constrain democratic processes. Americans across the political spectrum, from former President Donald Trump to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, have sounded alarms about the overlarge power of business in both public and private life. While many of the technologies and industries that worry Americans are new, the concerns they've raised are not unprecedented. Antimonopoly and American Democracy traces the history of antimonopoly politics in the United States, arguing that organized action against concentrated economic power comprises an important American democratic tradition. While prevailing narratives tend to treat monopoly as a risk to people mainly in their roles as consumers--by causing prices to increase, for example--this study broadens the conversation, recounting ways in which monopolism can hurt ordinary people without directly impacting their wallets. From the pre-revolutionary era to the age of Big Tech, the volume explores the effects that historical monopolies have had on democracy by using their wealth and influence to dominate electoral politics and regulation. Chapters also highlight a range of sites of economic concentration, from land ownership to media reach, and attempts at combating them, from labor organizing to constitutional revision. Featuring original scholarship from some of the world's leading experts in American economic, political, and legal history, Antimonopoly and American Democracy offers important lessons for our contemporary political moment, in which fears of concentrated wealth and influence are again on the rise.

Download or read book Journalism Democracy and Power A dialogue with Robert McChesney written by Aurora Labio-Bernal and published by Aula Magna. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Professor Robert McChesney engages in an academic dialogue with professors from various Spanish universities in response to his talk titled “Does the Collapse of Journalism Fuel the Rise of Fascism?” (2022). From a critical perspective, this encounter raises questions related to power and technology in the media, propaganda, local journalism, democracy, public broadcasters, media literacy, and the role of philanthropists, among other issues. Professor McChesney’s responses effectively constitute a compendium of his main ideas and research, and also reflect his significant role as an advocate for freer and more independent media and greater civic engagement in public affairs. At the same time, McChesney conveys the importance of effective communication and collective over individual action in order to tackle the problems that we are all called upon to address.

Download or read book Troubling Transparency written by David E. Pozen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, transparency is a widely heralded value, and the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is often held up as one of the transparency movement’s canonical achievements. Yet while many view the law as a powerful tool for journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens to pursue the public good, FOIA is beset by massive backlogs, and corporations and the powerful have become adept at using it for their own interests. Close observers of laws like FOIA have begun to question whether these laws interfere with good governance, display a deleterious anti-public-sector bias, or are otherwise inadequate for the twenty-first century’s challenges. Troubling Transparency brings together leading scholars from different disciplines to analyze freedom of information policies in the United States and abroad—how they are working, how they are failing, and how they might be improved. Contributors investigate the creation of FOIA; its day-to-day uses and limitations for the news media and for corporate and citizen requesters; its impact on government agencies; its global influence; recent alternatives to the FOIA model raised by the emergence of “open data” and other approaches to transparency; and the theoretical underpinnings of FOIA and the right to know. In addition to examining the mixed legacy and effectiveness of FOIA, contributors debate how best to move forward to improve access to information and government functioning. Neither romanticizing FOIA nor downplaying its real and symbolic achievements, Troubling Transparency is a timely and comprehensive consideration of laws such as FOIA and the larger project of open government, with wide-ranging lessons for journalism, law, government, and civil society.

Download or read book Saving the Media written by Julia Cagé and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-04 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The media are in crisis. Confronted by growing competition and sagging advertising revenue, news operations in print, on radio and TV, and even online are struggling to reinvent themselves. Many have gone under. For too many others, the answer has been to lay off reporters, join conglomerates, and lean more heavily on generic content. The result: in a world awash with information, news organizations provide citizens with less and less in-depth reporting and a narrowing range of viewpoints. If democracy requires an informed citizenry, this trend spells trouble. Julia Cagé explains the economics and history of the media crisis in Europe and America, and she presents a bold solution. The answer, she says, is a new business model: a nonprofit media organization, midway between a foundation and a joint stock company. Cagé shows how this model would enable the media to operate independent of outside shareholders, advertisers, and government, relying instead on readers, employees, and innovative methods of financing, including crowdfunding. Cagé’s prototype is designed to offer new ways to share and transmit power. It meets the challenges of the digital revolution and the realities of the twenty-first century, inspired by a central idea: that news, like education, is a public good. Saving the Media will be a key document in a debate whose stakes are nothing less crucial than the vitality of democracy.

Download or read book Investigative Reporting written by Marcy Burstiner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-18 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigative Reporting provides a step-by-step approach for tackling any investigative story, teaching reporters the skills they need to overcome common obstacles during investigative work. Experienced reporter and instructor, Marcy Burstiner offers readers guidance on how to identify story ideas, craft a premise, seek out human sources and documents, file public records requests, and analyze data. Including tips and advice from student and professional reporters, this comprehensive textbook also offers strategies for conducting interviews and for organizing information into a compelling story or series of stories that engage the reader through multimedia storytelling. Highlights of the new edition include: Updated examples and anatomies of news stories. Extensive discussion of data reporting and analysis for investigative projects. Guidance on how to request public records using state public records acts and how to appeal denials of public records requests. Instruction on the use of free, collaborative tools for organizing, sharing and analyzing information. A new chapter on creating a fact-checking system. A section on careers in investigative journalism. Interviews with student investigative reporters from colleges across the country, with professional investigative reporters from non-profit news organizations, emerging journalistic outlets and advocacy publications, and with staff and freelance reporters who produce stories for mainstream radio, television, print and online news organizations.

Download or read book Digital Technology and Democratic Theory written by Lucy Bernholz and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-02-17 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most far-reaching transformations in our era is the wave of digital technologies rolling over—and upending—nearly every aspect of life. Work and leisure, family and friendship, community and citizenship have all been modified by now-ubiquitous digital tools and platforms. Digital Technology and Democratic Theory looks closely at one significant facet of our rapidly evolving digital lives: how technology is radically changing our lives as citizens and participants in democratic governments. To understand these transformations, this book brings together contributions by scholars from multiple disciplines to wrestle with the question of how digital technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamental questions about democracy and democratic theory. As expectations have whiplashed—from Twitter optimism in the wake of the Arab Spring to Facebook pessimism in the wake of the 2016 US election—the time is ripe for a more sober and long-term assessment. How should we take stock of digital technologies and their promise and peril for reshaping democratic societies and institutions? To answer, this volume broaches the most pressing technological changes and issues facing democracy as a philosophy and an institution.

Download or read book The Enforcers written by Rob Wells and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-11-18 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1980s, real estate developer and banker Charles H. Keating executed one of the largest savings and loans frauds in United States history. Keating had long used the courts to muzzle critical reporting of his business dealings, but aggressive reporting by a small trade paper called the National Thrift News helped bring down Keating and offered an inspiring example of business journalism that speaks truth to power. Rob Wells tells the story through the work of Stan Strachan, a veteran financial journalist who uncovered Keating's misdeeds and links to a group of US senators—the Keating Five—who bullied regulators on his behalf. Editorial decisions at the National Thrift News angered advertisers and readers, but the newsroom sold ownership on the idea of investigative reporting as a commercial opportunity. Examining the National Thrift News's approach, Wells calls for a new era of business reporting that can—and must—embrace its potential as a watchdog safeguarding the interests of the public.

Download or read book Automating the News written by Nicholas Diakopoulos and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From hidden connections in big data to bots spreading fake news, journalism is increasingly computer-generated. Nicholas Diakopoulos explains the present and future of a world in which algorithms have changed how the news is created, disseminated, and received, and he shows why journalists--and their values--are at little risk of being replaced.

Download or read book Metrics at Work written by Angèle Christin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The starkly different ways that American and French online news companies respond to audience analytics and what this means for the future of news When the news moved online, journalists suddenly learned what their audiences actually liked, through algorithmic technologies that scrutinize web traffic and activity. Has this advent of audience metrics changed journalists’ work practices and professional identities? In Metrics at Work, Angèle Christin documents the ways that journalists grapple with audience data in the form of clicks, and analyzes how new forms of clickbait journalism travel across national borders. Drawing on four years of fieldwork in web newsrooms in the United States and France, including more than one hundred interviews with journalists, Christin reveals many similarities among the media groups examined—their editorial goals, technological tools, and even office furniture. Yet she uncovers crucial and paradoxical differences in how American and French journalists understand audience analytics and how these affect the news produced in each country. American journalists routinely disregard traffic numbers and primarily rely on the opinion of their peers to define journalistic quality. Meanwhile, French journalists fixate on internet traffic and view these numbers as a sign of their resonance in the public sphere. Christin offers cultural and historical explanations for these disparities, arguing that distinct journalistic traditions structure how journalists make sense of digital measurements in the two countries. Contrary to the popular belief that analytics and algorithms are globally homogenizing forces, Metrics at Work shows that computational technologies can have surprisingly divergent ramifications for work and organizations worldwide.

Download or read book Hybrid Investigative Journalism written by Maria Konow-Lund and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-12-23 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book is a rare example of the ethnographic study of investigative journalism. This book explores entrepreneurial attempts to combine traditional investigative journalism with alternative ways of organising this work. It transcends watershed investigative projects in favour of the ways in which new actors (citizens, technologists, bloggers and local reporters, among others) join experienced investigative journalists in experiments with the practices of watchdog journalism in the digital era. Cases include Bristol Cable, Bureau Local and the Korea Center for Investigative Journalism, as well as Forbidden Stories. The book also includes two chapters on the impact of COVID-19 upon the development of cross-disciplinary work in a traditional newsroom and in the larger media ecosystems of both Norway and China. This is a timely book for journalism students, scholars and investigative reporters, who share a passion for this form of journalism.

Download or read book Disrupting Investigative Journalism written by Amanda Gearing and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-29 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes the case for the enormous potential embodied in investigative journalism if reporters collaborate in the digital sphere and engage with emerging techniques and technologies. Bringing together personal narratives from investigative journalists who have successfully found, verified and published stories using social media platforms and Web based communications, Disrupting Investigative Journalism explores the risks and benefits that come from this kind of digital collaboration. Citing how digital connection has enabled reporters around the world to form the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which in turn led to such global news sensations as the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers, this book makes a practical argument for how the daily work of investigative journalism can change to capture enormous latent potential. This is a valuable text for students and scholars in the fields of investigative journalism, media and digital communication.

Download or read book Fixing American Politics written by Roderick P. Hart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fixing American Politics: Solutions for the Media Age brings together original chapters from 34 noted scholars from two disciplines – political science and communication – asked to identify the most pressing problems facing the American people and how they can be solved. Authors address the questions succinctly and directly, with their favored solutions featured in chapter titles that exhort and inspire. The book gives the reader much to think about and debate. Should news outlets be funded with public money rather than by private enterprise? Are the new social media a boon or a bane to political elections? Is the American past dead, or is it living once again? Do churchgoers and environmentalists have anything to discuss? Is the FCC doing its job? Can political ads be made less toxic? Should Fox News be "cancelled?" Should cancel cultures be cancelled? Can we become more civil to one another and, if so, how? Fixing American Politics poses all the best questions ... and offers some concrete answers as well. This book is perfect for students, citizens, the media, and anyone concerned with contemporary challenges to civic life and discourse today.

Download or read book Computing the News written by Sylvain Parasie and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faced with a full-blown crisis, a growing number of journalists are engaging in seemingly unjournalistic practices such as creating and maintaining databases, handling algorithms, or designing online applications. “Data journalists” claim that these approaches help the profession demonstrate greater objectivity and fulfill its democratic mission. In their view, computational methods enable journalists to better inform their readers, more closely monitor those in power, and offer deeper analysis. In Computing the News, Sylvain Parasie examines how data journalists and news organizations have navigated the tensions between traditional journalistic values and new technologies. He traces the history of journalistic hopes for computing technology and contextualizes the surge of data journalism in the twenty-first century. By importing computational techniques and ways of knowing new to journalism, news organizations have come to depend on a broader array of human and nonhuman actors. Parasie draws on extensive fieldwork in the United States and France, including interviews with journalists and data scientists as well as a behind-the-scenes look at several acclaimed projects in both countries. Ultimately, he argues, fulfilling the promise of data journalism requires the renewal of journalistic standards and ethics. Offering an in-depth analysis of how computing has become part of the daily practices of journalists, this book proposes ways for journalism to evolve in order to serve democratic societies.