Journalism Studies: A Critical Introduction

As the world of politics and public affairs has gradually changed beyond recognition over the past two decades, journalism too has been transformed... yet the study of news and journalism often seems stuck with ideas and debates which have lost much of their critical purchase. Journalism is at a crossroads: it needs to reaffirm core values and rediscover key activities, almost certainly in new forms, or it risks losing its distinctive character as well as its commercial basis.

Journalism Studies is a polemical textbook that rethinks the field of journalism studies for the contemporary era.

Organised around three central themes – ownership, objectivity and the public – Journalism Studies addresses the contexts in which journalism is produced, practised and disseminated. It outlines key issues and debates, reviewing established lines of critique in relation to the state of contemporary journalism, then offering alternative ways of approaching these issues, seeking to reconceptualise them in order to suggest an agenda for change and development in both journalism studies and journalism itself.

Journalism Studies is a concise and accessible introduction to contemporary journalism studies, and will be highly useful to undergraduate and postgraduate students on a range of Journalism, Media and Communications courses.

Dr Andrew Calcutt is Principal Lecturer in Journalism at the University of East London, where he leads master’s courses in Journalism and Magazines. He is vice-chair of the London East Research Institute and editor of Proof: reading journalism and society www.proof-reading.org. Previous publications include White Noise: an A-Z of contradictions in cyberculture (1999) and Arrested Development: pop culture and the erosion of adulthood (1998).

Dr Philip Hammond is Reader in Media & Communications at London South Bank University. He is the author of Media, War and Postmodernity (2007) and Framing Post-Cold War Conflicts (2007), and is co-editor, with Edward Herman, of Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis (2000).