Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy (Institutions of American Democracy),   ISBN:9780195181234

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This book ought to be assigned in Journalism 101 classes. Alex Jones talks about the challenges facing journalism as budgets decline, and on the way lays in wonderful primer material on journalism and the history of the free press, which is not as clearcut as most people think.

His major premise is this: What constitutes hard news - what he calls "the iron core of news" as distinguished from many non-news elements such as celebrity information, opinion, ads and so on that appear in publications or in the broadcast media - is endangered by print journalism's decline and the rise of the Internet.

As newsrooms shrink, there are fewer reporters doing the painstaking, shoe-leather reporting that help establish the core facts that other people can then argue or opine about. This means getting records, asking hard questions of public figures, putting it all in perspective, doggedly following up and being sure enough of their story to risk publishing in the face of threatened libel suits.

Journalism was seen by the Founders as having a special role justifying First Amendment protections, in that a democratic electorate, and lawmakers as well, can't make intelligent choices without good information upon which to base them. Jones sees the amount of such accurate information actually shrinking.

I can't argue with him about that, but can only observe that the whole journalism model in the US is in such rapid flux that we haven't seen yet where it will lead. Someone may yet find a profitable Internet business model that generates ample hard news online, perhaps parlaying the savings to be had from eliminating the huge overhead that printing and distributing a physical newspaper entails.

I particularly enjoyed his tracing of free-press rights from the John Peter Zenger case of the 1730s to Times vs. Sullivan in 1964. For much of that time, freedom of the press was effectively hamstrung by state laws. The most significant case in extending it, in my mind, was Near v. Minnesota in 1931, which upheld the right of an anti-Semitic rabble rouser, who was sometimes right in some of his attacks on government corruption, to publish after the state tried to shut him down. (Interesting detail not mentioned by Jones: a Jewish Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis, voted in Near's favor, while an anti-Semitic justice, James McReynolds, voted against him. I had a 1982 Washington Star editorial about this framed and hanging above my desk while I was a reporter.)

Times vs. Sullivan, a product of the civil rights era, is often hailed, but Jones accurately points out that it has created today's environment where not only public officials but public figures - celebrities of any sort - are routinely libelled because barriers to their suing successfully for same, as established in Times vs. Sullivan, are so great. If you have ever thought you'd never run for public office because you didn't want to be personally destroyed in the press by your enemies, this Supreme Court decision is a primary reason you think that.

I think Jones, like a lot of journalists, overestimates the value of investigative reporting. Many heads were turned by Woodward and Bernstein's success with Watergate, but this type of journalistic coup remains relatively rare. I saw too many wild goose chases, some involving entire news staffs, because some shaky tip coincided with some editor's desire to become the next Ben Bradlee. Countless reporters wasted countless hours combing public records for non-existent leads. It was my experience that big exposes actually come when someone with their own generally selfish motives ("destroy this guy so I can take his position") came to you with the information, and are prepared to show you public records supporting it. And they would start coming out of the woodwork if you portrayed yourself as a ballsy adversary of whatever establishment you were covering.

Jones, however, to his credit, doesn't see investigative reporting as the be-all and end-all, and enterprising amateur public citizens like James O'Keefe can actually do exposes on line. The real, unsung loss he's talking about is the decline in the other, less sexy categories, where reporters routinely document public proceedings and explain public life, creating a strong record of what actually happened - sometimes called "history's first draft." Without a strong hard news core, we get all the screaming and the slanting, but neither we nor our elected representatives get the facts we need to make up our own minds.

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'Losing the News' aims to deal with the degradation of the authority, focus and scope of contemporary journalism, especially in print media, in an era of gossip and 'parasidic' opinion disseminated via internet-based social media. Had Jones perhaps co-authored the book with a social scientist, we might have gotten a deeper insight into the context and prospects of a cultural phenomenon, rather than one symptom: why do social media have such a profound appeal, how does our emerging 'review culture' impact authority and the credibility of experts in general, and what does this mean, not only for informed and informative news, but also for our educational, political, and cultural norms and mechanisms? Jones is a respected newspaperman rightly concerned with disturbing developments in his industry and his profession. With a broader perspective, this book might have read less like an veteran journo lamenting change and offered a more compelling case for supporting information and analysis less tainted by market lobbyism and self-promotion.

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Anyone who regularly listens to the WNYC-produced radio show and podcast "On the Media" featuring Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone has heard much of the information in this book as it has developed over the past five years. The most frightening elements are those that document how large media and broadcast corporations have steadily diminished the importance of the vital role of reporters in the field, yielding to the temptations of merely becoming news aggregationists; that is, simply poring over the Internet or the wires (yes, they still teletype breaking news on this planet) and selecting stories to amplify on their nightly news or daily newspapers. The tragedy lies in many directions: the loss of truly investigative reporting due to cost-cutting measures (witness ABC's recent announcement for a truly frightening realization of the author's scenario); the increasing reliance on Internet social media such as YouTube-style reporting by everyday civilians (objectivity not required here); and the slow crumbling collapse of the American newspaper, shrinking visibly and morally from maintaining the local public informed of crucial issues in the community. With the concommitant rise of splashy media extravaganzas such as Fox News (do not be fooled - this is not merely a broadcasting venue) literally dictating what people should think and do, are we that far from realizing Josef Goebbel's vision of a populace fed only the information it believes it wants? This is a GREAT book, and it ought to be REQUIRED READING for Journalism majors.

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This is one extremly well-written and informative read. It should be mandatory reading for anybody who doubts the importance of the media to present honest & unbiased news. The authors credentials are unquestionable & his way of presenting his ideas is entertaining as well as enlightening. He has been there to see the transition of news go from honesty & integrity to the anything for a buck, sensationalism over substance attitude that the news has addopted over the years.

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The subtitle of this impassioned essay -- " The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy" -- tells half the story, one that's familiar to any alert reader of today's major newspapers. The other half of the story, equally familiar, is about how the Internet is undermining the newspaper industry and, in the process, steadily replacing the world as we know it with a frighteningly unknown future.

Alex Jones, a Pulitzer-Prize winning author, comes to these themes honestly as the scion of a small-town Tennessee newspaper family. It's no wonder he feels threatened.

In all fairness, there is considerable reason for apprehension over the decline of America's major newspapers. Reflecting shrunken profits, repeated staff layoffs, closed news bureaus, and greater reliance on syndicated material, the nation's once-fat dailies are slimming down at a terrifying pace. In place of the papers' often earnest efforts at "objectivity," we are increasingly basing our views on the unedited diatribes to be found on the likes of Fox "News" and the daily blogosphere. The perils for democracy in America are obvious. For example, could the so-called "Tea Party" have thrived in a world largely dependent on newspapers for its information? Or is that sad testament to the profound ignorance of the American people a product of Fox News, talk radio, and organized Internet rumor-mongering? You won't be surprised to learn that there is no question in my mind that, despite its familiarity to the 19th-Century No-Nothing movement, I'm convinced the Tea Party is an artifact of the channels through which we now receive so much of our political information.

Jones writes well, and my harsh criticism may not be entirely deserved. However, it comes from my nagging feeling as I read this book that its underlying theme is nostalgia, a craving for the day when so much of the news that appeared in the nation's dailies and on the air originated in the early edition of the Old Gray Lady, The New York Times. Those days are fast receding into history, and as Jones himself writes, there's not much anyone can do about it other than "Adapt or Die."

(From Mal Warwick's Blog on Books)