A Future for the News: What's Wrong with Mainstream News Media in America and How to Fix It

A Future for the News: What’s Wrong with Mainstream News Media in America and How to Fix It investigates and offers solutions to significant problems with the productive functioning of the mainstream news media. Criticism of the mainstream news media is almost a national pastime in America, and widespread polling shows credibility ratings of journalists among the lowest of any institution in America, almost as low as that of Congress. The institution of news media faces a plummeting morale of journalists; loss of readership; loss of viewers to competing, non-traditional venues for news; and so on. Moving from these problems to realistic solutions, this book serves as an instruction manual of sorts, with each chapter offering a pathway of improvement. This collection brings together academics and news industry professionals with individual chapters taking a specific area of concern and making a case for particular solutions to the problems presented. Solutions range from ones designed for individual reporters to consider, to those that target newsrooms, the institution of journalism, and news consuming audiences. Together they aim to help a beleaguered institution restore itself as a fully functioning asset of the American Republic.