Description
Book SynopsisReshaping the News: Community, Engagement, and Editors is the culmination of a six-year search for an economic resolution to the digital business conundrum facing the newspaper industry. Today's media tend to generate journalism with a low immediate newsroom impact, allowing journalists to continue reporting without considering the audience's increasingly dominant role in a story's longevity. This renders newsrooms as managed rather than led, and turns editors into facilitatorsmanaging project-driven journalism, attempting to match publishers' expectations of diversified income streams, and providing reporters with increased autonomy. In fact, newsrooms require a new kind of leadership, one that rethinks its relationship with the audience.
Reshaping the News argues for that alternative, deconstructing the reporting and editing relationship and illustrating the ideal version of editorial oversight. Author George Sylvie dissects reporter communities and culture,
Trade Review
"Despite the common belief, the current problems confronting newspapers started well before the existence of the World Wide Web and social media. Two factors in its decline were the disinvestment in newsrooms and the disconnection that developed between journalists and the community they were serving. Local journalism’s future survival depends on the ability of journalists to reconnect with their communities. George Sylvie has provided us with a well thought-out and detailed map as to how that reconnection could happen. The ideas in his book should promote serious thought and directed action by everyone who understands that democracy cannot survive without strong journalism. I recommend this book for scholars, students, and the public." —Stephen Lacy, Professor Emeritus, Michigan State University
"Reshaping the News: Community, Engagement, and Editors addresses fundamental and significant questions about why news organizations still have not responded well to digital media even after two decades. George Sylvie argues that most have responded in the wrong way, and that there is a need for these news organizations to refocus their attention on local communities and change the nature of the news they cover. This is an important book for anyone concerned about the future of journalism and news enterprises." —Robert G. Picard, Reuters Institute, University of Oxford
Table of Contents
List of Figures – Maxwell McCombs: Preface: New Maps – Setting – Part I. Where We Are – The Dilemma of Newsroom Management – Understanding News, Geopolitics, and Editing – The Big Fail – Part II. Why We Should Have Left – The Costs of Knowledge – Fallacies and the Future of Audience Engagement – Part III. Where We Need to Go – Where No Journalist Has Gone – Conclusion and a Beginning – Index.
