Beyond News: The Future of Journalism (Columbia Journalism Review Books)

About this book

For a century and a half journalists made a good business out of selling the latest news or selling ads next to that news. Now that news pours out of the Internet and our mobile devicesfast abundant and mostly freethat era is ending. Our best journalists Mitchell Stephens argues instead must offer original challenging perspectivesnot just slightly more thorough accounts of widely reported events. His book proposes a new standard: "wisdom journalism " an amalgam of the more rarified forms of reportingexclusive enterprising investigativeand informed insightful interpretive explanatory even opinionated takes on current events. This book features an original sometimes critical examination of contemporary journalism both on- and offline and it finds inspiration for a more ambitious and effective understanding of journalism in examples from twenty-first-century articles and blogs as well as in a selection of outstanding twentieth-century journalism and Benjamin Franklins eighteenth-century writings. Most attempts to deal with journalisms current crisis emphasize technology. Stephens emphasizes mindsets and the need to rethink what journalism has been and might become.