The Politics of Reality Television encompasses an international selection of expert contributions who consider the specific ways media migrations test our understanding of, and means of investigating, reality television across the globe. The book addresses a wide range of topics, including: the global circulation and local adaptation of reality television formats and franchises the production of fame and celebrity around hitherto "ordinary" people the transformation of self under the public eye the tensions between fierce loyalties to local representatives and imagined communities bonding across regional and ethnic divides the struggle over the meanings and values of reality television across a range of national, regional, gender, class and religious contexts. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students on a range of Media and Television Studies courses, particularly those on the globalisation of television and media, and reality television.

Praise for the first edition:
This collection of essays comes mainly from academics but nobody should bridle at theorists lecturing practitioners. They properly challenge the way September 11th was reported - in a way that's both an endorsement of the role of the media and a wake-up call on its failures . . . anyone interested in our trade should read it.' - Roger Mosey, Ariel
'A thoughtful and engaging examination of the effects of 9/11 on the field of journalism. Its unique aim is to discuss the impact of the attack as a personal trauma and its current and future effects on journalism and the reporting of the news. . . highly recommended.' - Library Journal

Journalism After September 11 examines how the traumatic attacks of that day continue to transform the nature of journalism, particularly in the United States and Britain. Familiar notions of what it means to be a journalist, how best to practice journalism, and what the public can reasonably expect of journalists in the name of democracy, were shaken to their foundations.

Ten years on, however, new questions arise regarding the lasting implications of that tragic day and its aftermath.

Bringing together an internationally respected collection of scholars and media commentators, Journalism After September 11 addresses topics such as: journalism and public life at a time of crisis; broadsheet and tabloid newspaper coverage of the attacks; the role of sources in shaping the news; reporting by global news media such as CNN; Western representations of Islam; current affairs broadcasting; news photography and trauma; the emotional well-being of reporters; online journalism; as well as a host of pertinent issues around news, democracy and citizenship.

This second edition includes four new chapters ? examining Arabic newspaper reporting of the attacks, the perceptions of television audiences, national magazine coverage of the ensuing crisis, and the media politics of ?othering? ? as well as revised chapters from the first edition and an updated Introduction by the co-editors. A foreword is provided by Victor Navasky and an afterword by Phillip Knightley.

Images, Ethics, Technology explores the changing ethical implications of images and the ways they are communicated and understood. It emphasises how images change not only through their modes of representation, but through our relationship to them. In order to understand images, we must understand how they are produced, communicated, and displayed. Each of the 14 essays chart the relationship to technology as part of a larger complex social and cultural matrix, highlighting how these relations constrain and enable notions of responsibility with respect to images and what they represent. They demonstrate that as technology develops and changes, the images themselves change, not just with respect to content, but in the very meanings and indices they produce. This is a collection that not only asks: who speaks for the art? But also: who speaks for the witnesses, the cameras, the documented, the landscape, the institutional platforms, the taboos, those wishing to be forgotten, those being seen and the experience of viewing itself? Images, Ethics, Technology is ideal for advanced level students and researchers in media and communications, visual culture and cultural studies.

This book re-visits how we think about communication and power in the global era. It takes stock of the last fifty years of scholarship, maps key patterns and concepts and sets an agenda for theory and research. The book addresses such questions as: How are national and cultural identities re-fashioned and expressed in the global era? How can we best understand the emergence of multiple and sometimes antagonistic modernities worldwide? How are political struggles fought and communicated on the local-national-global nexus? How do we integrate emerging media environments in global communication studies? Bringing together essays from a range of internationally renowned scholars, this book will be useful to undergraduate and postgraduate students on Media and Communication Studies courses, particularly those studying globalisation and global media. Contributors: Hector Amaya Paula Chakravartty Andrew Crocco Myria Georgiou Le Han Aniko Imre Koichi Iwabuchi Marwan M. Kraidy Sara Mourad Patrick D. Murphy Tarik Sabry Paddy Scannell Piotr M. Szpunar Guobin Yang Barbie Zelizer

Making the University Matter investigates how academics situate themselves simultaneously in the university and the world and how doing so affects the viability of the university setting.

The university stands at the intersection of two sets of interests, needing to be at one with the world while aspiring to stand apart from it. In an era that promises intensified political instability, growing administrative pressures, dwindling economic returns and questions about economic viability, lower enrolments and shrinking programs, can the university continue to matter into the future? And if so, in which way? What will help it survive as an honest broker? What are the mechanisms for ensuring its independent voice?

Barbie Zelizer brings together some of the leading names in the field of media and communication studies from around the globe to consider a multiplicity of answers from across the curriculum on making the university matter, including critical scholarship, interdisciplinarity, curricular blends of the humanities and social sciences, practical training and policy work.

The collection is introduced with an essay by the editor and each section has a brief introduction to contextualise the essays and highlight the issues they raise.

The Changing Faces of Journalism: Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness brings together an array of internationally renowned scholars who consider how contemporary journalism has wrestled with its changing parameters and how notions of tabloidization, technology and truthiness have altered our understanding of journalism.

The collection is introduced with an essay by Barbie Zelizer and organized into three sections: how tabloidization affects the journalistic landscape; how technology changes what we think we know about journalism; and how 'truthiness' tweaks our understanding of the journalistic tradition. Short section introductions contextualise the essays and highlight the issues that they raise, creating a coherent study of journalism today.

When and how do communication and history impact each other? How do disciplinary perspectives affect what we know?

Explorations in Communication and History addresses the link between what we know and how we know it by tracking the intersection of communication and history. Asking how each discipline has enhanced and hindered our understanding of the other, the book considers what happens to what we know when disciplines engage.

Through a critical collection of essays written by top scholars in the field, the book addresses the engagement of communication and history as it applies to the study of technology, audiences and journalism. A comprehensive introduction by Barbie Zelizer contextualises these debates and makes a case for the importance of disciplinary engagement for teaching as well as research in media and cultural studies and each section has a brief introduction to contextualise the essays and highlight the issues they raise, making this an invaluable collection for students and scholars alike.

When and how do communication and history impact each other? How do disciplinary perspectives affect what we know?

Explorations in Communication and History addresses the link between what we know and how we know it by tracking the intersection of communication and history. Asking how each discipline has enhanced and hindered our understanding of the other, the book considers what happens to what we know when disciplines engage.

Through a critical collection of essays written by top scholars in the field, the book addresses the engagement of communication and history as it applies to the study of technology, audiences and journalism. A comprehensive introduction by Barbie Zelizer contextualises these debates and makes a case for the importance of disciplinary engagement for teaching as well as research in media and cultural studies and each section has a brief introduction to contextualise the essays and highlight the issues they raise, making this an invaluable collection for students and scholars alike.

Reporting War explores the social responsibilities of the journalist during times of military conflict. News media treatments of international crises, especially the one underway in Iraq, are increasingly becoming the subject of public controversy, and discussion is urgently needed. Each of this book's contributors challenges familiar assumptions about war reporting from a distinctive perspective. An array of pressing issues associated with conflicts over recent years are identified and critiqued, always with an eye to what they can tell us about improving journalism today. 'them' news narratives, access to sources, '24/7 rolling news' and the 'CNN effect', military jargon (such as 'friendly fire' and 'collateral damage'), 'embedded' and 'unilateral' reporters, tensions between objectivity and patriotism, amongst others. Special attention is devoted to considering recent changes in journalistic forms and practices, and the ways in which they are shaping the visual culture of war. Taken together, the book's chapters raise important questions about the very future of journalism during wartime, questions which demand public dialogue and debate. news journalism, as well as for researchers, teachers and practitioners in the field. Stuart Allan, Patricia Aufderheide, Michael Bromley, Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Susan L. Carruthers, Nick Couldry, John Downey, Adel Iskandar, Mohammed el-Nawawy, Philip Hammond, Richard Keeble, Douglas Kel

Images, Ethics, Technology explores the changing ethical implications of images and the ways they are communicated and understood. It emphasises how images change not only through their modes of representation, but through our relationship to them. In order to understand images, we must understand how they are produced, communicated, and displayed. Each of the 14 essays chart the relationship to technology as part of a larger complex social and cultural matrix, highlighting how these relations constrain and enable notions of responsibility with respect to images and what they represent. They demonstrate that as technology develops and changes, the images themselves change, not just with respect to content, but in the very meanings and indices they produce. This is a collection that not only asks: who speaks for the art? But also: who speaks for the witnesses, the cameras, the documented, the landscape, the institutional platforms, the taboos, those wishing to be forgotten, those being seen and the experience of viewing itself? Images, Ethics, Technology is ideal for advanced level students and researchers in media and communications, visual culture and cultural studies.

Making the University Matter investigates how academics situate themselves simultaneously in the university and the world and how doing so affects the viability of the university setting.

The university stands at the intersection of two sets of interests, needing to be at one with the world while aspiring to stand apart from it. In an era that promises intensified political instability, growing administrative pressures, dwindling economic returns and questions about economic viability, lower enrolments and shrinking programs, can the university continue to matter into the future? And if so, in which way? What will help it survive as an honest broker? What are the mechanisms for ensuring its independent voice?

Barbie Zelizer brings together some of the leading names in the field of media and communication studies from around the globe to consider a multiplicity of answers from across the curriculum on making the university matter, including critical scholarship, interdisciplinarity, curricular blends of the humanities and social sciences, practical training and policy work.

The collection is introduced with an essay by the editor and each section has a brief introduction to contextualise the essays and highlight the issues they raise.

This book re-visits how we think about communication and power in the global era. It takes stock of the last fifty years of scholarship, maps key patterns and concepts and sets an agenda for theory and research. The book addresses such questions as: How are national and cultural identities re-fashioned and expressed in the global era? How can we best understand the emergence of multiple and sometimes antagonistic modernities worldwide? How are political struggles fought and communicated on the local-national-global nexus? How do we integrate emerging media environments in global communication studies? Bringing together essays from a range of internationally renowned scholars, this book will be useful to undergraduate and postgraduate students on Media and Communication Studies courses, particularly those studying globalisation and global media. Contributors: Hector Amaya Paula Chakravartty Andrew Crocco Myria Georgiou Le Han Aniko Imre Koichi Iwabuchi Marwan M. Kraidy Sara Mourad Patrick D. Murphy Tarik Sabry Paddy Scannell Piotr M. Szpunar Guobin Yang Barbie Zelizer

Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication. Building on the work of materialist theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and Henri Lefebvre, the essays collected here examine the materiality of discourse itself and the constitutive force of communication in the production of the real.

Communication Matters presents original work that rethinks communication as material and situates materialist approaches to communication within the broader "materiality turn" emerging in the humanities and social sciences.

This collection will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in Media, Communication Studies, and Rhetoric.

The book includes images of the digital media installations of Francesca Talenti, Professor, Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication. Building on the work of materialist theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and Henri Lefebvre, the essays collected here examine the materiality of discourse itself and the constitutive force of communication in the production of the real.

Communication Matters presents original work that rethinks communication as material and situates materialist approaches to communication within the broader "materiality turn" emerging in the humanities and social sciences.

This collection will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in Media, Communication Studies, and Rhetoric.

The book includes images of the digital media installations of Francesca Talenti, Professor, Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Praise for the first edition:
This collection of essays comes mainly from academics but nobody should bridle at theorists lecturing practitioners. They properly challenge the way September 11th was reported - in a way that's both an endorsement of the role of the media and a wake-up call on its failures . . . anyone interested in our trade should read it.' - Roger Mosey, Ariel
'A thoughtful and engaging examination of the effects of 9/11 on the field of journalism. Its unique aim is to discuss the impact of the attack as a personal trauma and its current and future effects on journalism and the reporting of the news. . . highly recommended.' - Library Journal

Journalism After September 11 examines how the traumatic attacks of that day continue to transform the nature of journalism, particularly in the United States and Britain. Familiar notions of what it means to be a journalist, how best to practice journalism, and what the public can reasonably expect of journalists in the name of democracy, were shaken to their foundations.

Ten years on, however, new questions arise regarding the lasting implications of that tragic day and its aftermath.

Bringing together an internationally respected collection of scholars and media commentators, Journalism After September 11 addresses topics such as: journalism and public life at a time of crisis; broadsheet and tabloid newspaper coverage of the attacks; the role of sources in shaping the news; reporting by global news media such as CNN; Western representations of Islam; current affairs broadcasting; news photography and trauma; the emotional well-being of reporters; online journalism; as well as a host of pertinent issues around news, democracy and citizenship.

This second edition includes four new chapters examining Arabic newspaper reporting of the attacks, the perceptions of television audiences, national magazine coverage of the ensuing crisis, and the media politics of othering as well as revised chapters from the first edition and an updated Introduction by the co-editors. A foreword is provided by Victor Navasky and an afterword by Phillip Knightley.

The collection is introduced with an essay by Barbie Zelizer and organized into three sections: how tabloidization affects the journalistic landscape; how technology changes what we think we know about journalism; and how truthiness tweaks our understanding of the journalistic tradition. Short section introductions contextualise the essays and highlight the issues that they raise, creating a coherent study of journalism today.

Reporting War explores the social responsibilities of the journalist during times of military conflict. News media treatments of international crises, especially the one underway in Iraq, are increasingly becoming the subject of public controversy, and discussion is urgently needed.

Each of this book's contributors challenges familiar assumptions about war reporting from a distinctive perspective. An array of pressing issues associated with conflicts over recent years are identified and critiqued, always with an eye to what they can tell us about improving journalism today.

Special attention is devoted to recent changes in journalistic forms and practices, and the ways in which they are shaping the visual culture of war, and issues discussed, amongst many, include:

• the influence of censorship and propaganda
• 'us' and 'them' news narratives
• access to sources
• '24/7 rolling news' and the 'CNN effect'
• military jargon (such as 'friendly fire' and 'collateral damage')
• 'embedded' and 'unilateral' reporters
• tensions between objectivity and patriotism.

The book raises important questions about the very future of journalism during wartime, questions which demand public dialogue and debate, and is essential reading for students taking courses in news and news journalism, as well as for researchers, teachers and practitioners in the field.

Reality television is global. Transnational television companies and international distribution networks facilitate the worldwide circulation of popular shows; the 1990s in particular saw the growth of media companies that specialize in the development of reality television formats that are easily adaptable to local variations. While the industrial history of the global migrations of reality television is well established, there has been less consideration of the theoretical and methodological implications of this expansion. The Politics of Reality Television encompasses an international selection of expert contributions who consider the specific ways these migrations test our understanding of, and means of investigating, reality television across the globe. The book addresses a wide range of topics, including: * the global circulation and local adaptation of reality television formats and franchises * the production of fame and celebrity around hitherto "ordinary" people * the transformation of self under the public eye * the tensions between fierce loyalties to local representatives and imagined communities bonding across regional and ethnic divides * the struggle over the meanings and values of reality television across a range of national, regional, gender, class and religious contexts. The Politics of Reality Television proposes ways in which we can think through the international dimensions of reality television in the context of highly mobile media, politics, and publics. It offers a global, comparative examination of reality television alongside empirical research about the genre, its producers and consumers. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students on a range of Media and Television Studies courses, particularly those on the globalisation of television and media, and reality television.

There is no more gruesome and tragic record in the history of the 20th century than the photographs taken at the liberation of the concentration camps in Germany after World War II. These images are seared into our collective memory as brutal evidence of the atrocity of war and the evil of which humanity is capable. But the horrific content of these images has somewhat obscured their status as historical documents. This text reveals the unique significance of the concentration camp photographs - how they have become the basis of our memory of the Holocaust and how they have affected our presentations and perceptions of contemporary history's subsequent atrocities. Prior to the Holocaust, news reporters primarily told their stories in words, using photographs almost as an afterthought. When the camps were liberated, however, journalists and reporters turned to photography to bear witness to the unspeakable and indescribable scenes of the dead and dying. Through this process, the text argues, photographs earned a new legitimacy as tools of reporting. The author shows how, since the end of the war, the use of "atrocity photos" has fallen into patterns - or waves of memory - determined by the different roles that the photos occupy in the public imagination. Most recently, for example, the images from Bosnia hark back to the Holocaust imagery, an echo that can actually dilute our response to what happened both then and now.

""The authors are familiar with the emerging jargon of media convergence and they define large parts of it well. They have also laboured impressively to gather and define useful examples of journalese ...This book is a labour of love that reflects immense care and learning. It makes a helpful contribution to a fledgling field of academia and to uniting the cultures of news and journalism studies."
Tim Luckhurst, University of Kent, UK

" This comprehensive glossary offers clear and insightful definitions of the most significant keywords in news and journalism studies.

Ranging from 'above the fold' to 'zinger', and with over 400 terms in between, it covers words associated with newspapers, radio and television news, magazines, photojournalism and internet reporting. Other examples include 'agenda setting', 'libel', 'news values', 'objectivity, ' 'scoop' and 'tabloidization'.

Written by two of the field's leading scholars, it offers an informed perspective on the key terms. It considers a range of genres, including business, crime, environmental, fashion, lifestyle, investigative, science, sports and war journalism as well as looking at new alternatives such as 'Wikinews' and 'Twitter'.

This lively and engaging treatment will provide students, researchers and journalists with a solid grounding in the fast-moving vocabulary of news and journalism studies.

"Barbie Zelizer provides enormous service to students and scholars with this comprehensive and highly persuasive critique of the literature in and about journalism as both process and practice, as a profession and an industry. Zelizer takes a step back to look at what we know about news, and she does not pull her punches in pointing out what we do not know." -Linda Steiner, Rutgers University "Zelizer's encyclopedic review of scholarly studies of journalism fills an important need for researchers, and comparing that scholarship across disciplines, generations and countries makes it even more valuable. . . Her analyses will be invaluable for media research and should also spur interest in journalism among the social science and other disciplines she studied. . .The book is an impressive achievement." -Herbert J. Gans, Columbia University and author of Democracy and the News "Taking Journalism Seriously is a refulgent analysis of the condition of journalism studies. Zelizer has produced a critical and lasting contribution to our understanding of the position of news, journalism and journalism practice within the disciplines of political science, sociology, psychology, philosophy, language and cultural studies. This excellent book is an engaging and sophisticated treatise on both the historical and contemporary theoretical perspectives of journalism scholarship." -Howard Tumber, City University, London How have scholars tended to conceptualize news, newsmaking, journalism, journalists, and the news media? Which explanatory frames have they used to explore journalistic practice? From which fields of inquiry have they borrowed in shaping their assumptions about how journalism works? In Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy, author Barbie Zelizer discusses questions about the viability of the field of journalism scholarship and examines journalism as a discipline, a profession, a practice, and a cultural phenomenon. Taking Journalism Seriously argues that scholars have remained too entrenched within their own disciplinary areas resulting in isolated bodies of scholarship. This is the first book to critically survey journalism scholarship in one volume and organize it by disparate fields. The book reviews existing journalism research in such diverse fields as sociology, history, language studies, political science, and cultural analysis and dissects the most prevalent and understated research in each discipline. The author provides a critical mapping of the field of journalism studies and encourages academics to look at journalism from various disciplinary perspectives. Taking Journalism Seriously advocates a realignment of the ways in which journalism has traditionally been conceptualized and urges scholars to think anew about what journalism is as well as reflect on why they see it as they do. Taking Journalism Seriously is designed for undergraduate and graduate students in advanced courses on Journalism and Journalism Studies. It will also be of interest to scholars, academics, and researchers in the fields of Journalism, Communication, Media Studies, Sociology, and Cultural Studies.

Images of the assassination of John F. Kennedy are burned deeply into the memories of millions who watched the events of November 1963 unfold live on television. Never before had America seen an event of this magnitude as it happened. But what is it we remember? How did the near chaos of the shooting and its aftermath get transformed into a seamless story of epic proportions? In this book, Barbie Zelizer explores the way we learned about and came to make sense of the killing of the president. Covering the Body (the title refers to the charge given journalists to follow a president) is a powerful reassessment of the media's role in shaping our collective memory of the assassination-at the same time as it used the assassination coverage to legitimize its own role as official interpreter of American reality. Of the more than fifty reporters covering Kennedy in Dallas, no one actually saw the assassination. And faced with a monumentally important story that was continuously breaking, most journalists had no time to verify leads or substantiate reports. Rather, they took discrete moments of their stories and turned them into one coherent narrative, blurring what was and was not "professional" about their coverage. Through incisive analyses of the many accounts and investigations in the years since the shooting, Zelizer reveals how journalists used the assassination not just to relay the news but to address the issues they saw as central to the profession and to promote themselves as cultural authorities. Indeed, argues Zelizer, these motivations are still alive and are at the core of the controversy surrounding Oliver Stone's movie, JFK. At its heart, Covering the Body raises serious questions about the role of the media in defining our reality, and shaping our myths and memories. In tracing how journalists attempted to answer questions that still trouble most Americans, Zelizer offers a fascinating analysis of the role of the media as cultural authorities.

A collection of essays by prominent scholars from many disciplines on the construction of public memories.

The study of public memory has grown rapidly across numerous disciplines in recent years, among them American studies, history, philosophy, sociology, architecture, and communications. As scholars probe acts of collective remembrance, they have shed light on the cultural processes of memory. Essays contained in this volume address issues such as the scope of public memory, the ways we forget, the relationship between politics and memory, and the material practices of memory.

Stephen Browne's contribution studies the alternative to memory erasure, silence, and forgetting as posited by Hannah Arendt in her classic "Eichmann in Jerusalem." Rosa Eberly writes about the Texas tower shootings of 1966, memories of which have been minimized by local officials. Charles Morris examines public reactions to Larry Kramer's declaration that
Abraham Lincoln was homosexual, horrifying the guardians of Lincoln's
public memory. And Barbie Zelizer considers the impact on public memory
of visual images, specifically still photographs of individuals about to perish (e.g., people falling from the World Trade Center) and the sense of communal loss they manifest.

Whether addressing the transitory and mutable nature of collective memories over time or the ways various groups maintain, engender, or resist those memories, this work constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of how public memory has been and might continue to be framed.

"Barbie Zelizer provides enormous service to students and scholars with this comprehensive and highly persuasive critique of the literature in and about journalism as both process and practice, as a profession and an industry. Zelizer takes a step back to look at what we know about news, and she does not pull her punches in pointing out what we do not know." -Linda Steiner, Rutgers University "Zelizer's encyclopedic review of scholarly studies of journalism fills an important need for researchers, and comparing that scholarship across disciplines, generations and countries makes it even more valuable. . . Her analyses will be invaluable for media research and should also spur interest in journalism among the social science and other disciplines she studied. . .The book is an impressive achievement." -Herbert J. Gans, Columbia University and author of Democracy and the News "Taking Journalism Seriously is a refulgent analysis of the condition of journalism studies. Zelizer has produced a critical and lasting contribution to our understanding of the position of news, journalism and journalism practice within the disciplines of political science, sociology, psychology, philosophy, language and cultural studies. This excellent book is an engaging and sophisticated treatise on both the historical and contemporary theoretical perspectives of journalism scholarship." -Howard Tumber, City University, London How have scholars tended to conceptualize news, newsmaking, journalism, journalists, and the news media? Which explanatory frames have they used to explore journalistic practice? From which fields of inquiry have they borrowed in shaping their assumptions about how journalism works? In Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy, author Barbie Zelizer discusses questions about the viability of the field of journalism scholarship and examines journalism as a discipline, a profession, a practice, and a cultural phenomenon. Taking Journalism Seriously argues that scholars have remained too entrenched within their own disciplinary areas resulting in isolated bodies of scholarship. This is the first book to critically survey journalism scholarship in one volume and organize it by disparate fields. The book reviews existing journalism research in such diverse fields as sociology, history, language studies, political science, and cultural analysis and dissects the most prevalent and understated research in each discipline. The author provides a critical mapping of the field of journalism studies and encourages academics to look at journalism from various disciplinary perspectives. Taking Journalism Seriously advocates a realignment of the ways in which journalism has traditionally been conceptualized and urges scholars to think anew about what journalism is as well as reflect on why they see it as they do. Taking Journalism Seriously is designed for undergraduate and graduate students in advanced courses on Journalism and Journalism Studies. It will also be of interest to scholars, academics, and researchers in the fields of Journalism, Communication, Media Studies, Sociology, and Cultural Studies.

Coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky saga followed in a long trail of media exposures of the more personal details of the lives of public figures. Many commentators have seen stories like this, and TV shows like Jerry Springer's, as evidence of a decline in the standards of the mass media. This increasing interest in private lives and the falling off of coverage of serious news is often described as Otabloidization.O The essays in this book are the first serious scholarly studies of what is going on and what its implications are. Reality, it turns out, is much more complex than some of the laments suggest. As the contributors show, this is not just a U.S. problem but is repeated in country after country, and it is not certain that the media anywhere are getting more tabloid. What is more, there is no consensus about whether tabloidization is just Odumbing downO or whether it is a necessary tactic for the mass media to engage with new audiences who do not have the news habit. Tabloid Tales will be of interest to students and scholars in journalism, mass communication, political science, and cultural and media studies.