The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again
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I learned of this book from a February 4, 2010, interview with the authors on Democracy Now. Nichols is a correspondent for The Nation, and McChesney is a professor at U Illinois and host of NPR's "Media Matters" program on matters in, you guessed it, the media.
This book explores the nature and importance of journalism and its immanent demise in the US. They explore possible adaptations to our present situation that might slow or reverse the evisceration of a vital mechanism protecting what remains of our civil society.
We are not the first to write about this crisis; we honor and embrace the lessons learned from those who have come before us. But this book is different from most if not all books about the collapse of journalism. What we offer here is a deeper and more historical analysis of the crisis, one that goes beyond blaming the Internet and the Great Recession for the collapse of traditional new media business models. New technologies and a scorching economic crisis clearly shape our moment, but this is a crisis decades, not years, in the making. The issues that are now so much in play have roots in a deep-seated and longstanding tension between commercialism and the public good that is journalism.
