Changing the News: The Forces Shaping Journalism in Uncertain Times

Changing the News examines the difficulties in changing news processes and practices in response to the evolving circumstances and struggles of the journalism industry. The editors have put together this volume to demonstrate why the prescriptions employed to salvage the journalism industry to date haven’t worked, and to explain how constraints and pressures have influenced the field’s responses to challenges in an uncertain, changing environment.

If journalism is to adjust and thrive, the following questions need answers: Why do journalists and news organizations respond to uncertainties in the ways they do? What forces and structures constrain these responses? What social and cultural contexts should we take into account when we judge whether or not journalism successfully responds and adapts? The book tackles these questions from varying perspectives and levels of analysis, through chapters by scholars of news sociology and media management. Changing the News details the forces that shape and challenge journalism and journalistic culture, and explains why journalists and their organizations respond to troubles, challenges and uncertainties in the way they do.

Wilson Lowrey is an associate professor in the College of Communication and Information Sciences at The University of Alabama. Lowrey’s research focuses on the sociology of news work, and has been published in a number of journals, including Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Political Communication, Journalism, Journalism Studies and Journal of Media Economics.

Peter J. Gade is a Gaylord Family Professor and Journalism Area Head in the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma. He is a co-author of Twilight of Press Freedom: The Rise of People’s Journalism (2001). He is a former newspaper reporter and mid-level manager and has worked as an organizational consultant for newspapers, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.