A History of News - Softcover

Stephens, Mitchell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195189914 ISBN 13: 9780195189919

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2006

Synopsis

What is news? Why are we so eager to exchange it? Why does it so often seem sensational? How does the way news is gathered and presented affect our politics and our lives? A History of News, Third Edition, provides an extended, international history of journalism that ranges from preliterate societies to the digital age. It examines the strengths and weaknesses of news and provides unique insights into contemporary journalism. Author Mitchell Stephens, an accomplished writer and media critic, analyzes news in all of its manifestations--spoken, written, visual and digital--from an international perspective.
For the third edition, Stephens has broadened the scope of the book's international coverage, expanded the section on television news, increased coverage of women and minorities and added new material on the Internet and the digital revolution. The book also features an updated timeline, questions at the end of each chapter and new boxes, many of which underline connections between older news systems and issues in contemporary journalism.

About this title

About the Author:

Mitchell Stephens is a professor of journalism at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Institute. His books include Imagine There's No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World; Beyond News: The Future of Journalism; Journalism Unbound; A History of News, named a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year"; the rise of the image, the fall of the word; Broadcast News; and Writing and Reporting the News. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. 

From Publishers Weekly:

Humankind has always been interested in news, notes New York University journalism professor Stephens, and in this impressive work he shows how that interest has been satisfied. Although it is impossible to provide examples of the oral transmission of news from preliterate societies before the third millennium B.C., the author demonstrates it in action among primitives in the 19th and 20th centuries. Thence he moves to handwritten news, sometimes in personal letters, sometimes in public notices, like the acta posted and copied in ancient Rome and the newsletters written in Renaissance Venice, which were the immediate predecessors of newspapers. News in print followed quickly after the invention of movable type and newspapers proliferated, until they began to be supplemented, if not supplanted, by the electronic media. This solid history is made even more absorbing by such sidelights as the universal fascination with gossip, gore and the supernatural and trenchant observations about the relationship between society and the news it consumes.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0195189914
• ISBN 13: 9780195189919
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 384