When MBAs Rule the Newsroom - How the Marketers and Managers Are Reshaping Today's Media (Hardcover, New)

Mencken is supposed to have said that it's a newspaper's job to comfort the afflicted - and to afflict the comfortable. On the dismaying evidence of Underwood's thoughtful survey of the user-friendly pap that now passes for print journalism, the famed editor's sly canon has become a very dead letter. A working reporter for 13 years before he began teaching at the University of Washington, Underwood offers a sobering appraisal of the newspaper business that - if not quite as lively as Howard Kurtz's Media Circus (p. 279) - is appreciably more systematic and better documented. Paying close attention to the influence of a former employer (Gannett and its USA Today) as well as TV, the author focuses on how a new breed of market-minded, profit-oriented executives has changed the face and shoddied the editorial content of newspapers throughout the country. Covered as well is the flashy makeover's impact on newsrooms that once were havens for nonconformist mavericks informed by a love of good writing and an absolute conviction that they were rendering an essential public service. Now, Underwood concludes, only team players willing to see their prose homogenized beyond all individual recognition need apply. In what appears to be triumph of hope over experience, the author closes on an upbeat note, pointing out that newspapers not only meet social and psychic needs but also set the agendas for broadcast media in today's wired-up world. A first-rate critique of the infotainment/customer trap into which commercialism has lured many of the metropolitan dailies owned by conglomerates rather than by proprietors who view their equity as a trust. (Kirkus Reviews)

This in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the modern newsroom reveals the ways in which the customer-driven approach to news and the "USA Todayization" of newspapers threaten the values that have guided generations of American journalists. Underwood takes readers on a tour of the large corporations that dominate today's media, uncovering how demands for high-profit, "reader-friendly" journalism are handcuffing journalists and turning the news into just another product in the great American sellathon. His lucid discussion draws from more than one hundred interviews with newspaper editors, reporters, and consultants, as well as from a three-year management policy survey administered to 429 newsroom employees at twelve daily newspapers. Writing with anger but with a deep affection for the trade, he examines the growing economic pressures within the industry, the roots of the managerial revolution, and the impact of marketplace journalism on the operation of the newsroom and employee morale.

General

Imprint:	Columbia University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	July 1993
First published:	July 1993
Authors:	Doug Underwood
Dimensions:	237 x 157 x 23mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover - Trade binding
Pages:	259
Edition:	New
ISBN-13:	978-0-231-08048-4
Categories:	Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Communication studies > Media studies Books > Business & Economics > Industry & industrial studies > Media, information & communication industries > Radio & television industry Books > Business & Economics > Industry & industrial studies > Media, information & communication industries > Press & journalism
LSN:	0-231-08048-4
Barcode:	9780231080484

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