Princeton University Press
All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information Into News
Key Metrics
- James T Hamilton
- Princeton University Press
- Paperback
- 9780691123677
- 9.06 X 6.84 X 0.83 inches
- 1.07 pounds
- Social Science > Media Studies
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
That market forces drive the news is not news. Whether a story appears in print, on television, or on the Internet depends on who is interested, its value to advertisers, the costs of assembling the details, and competitors' products. But in All the News That's Fit to Sell, economist James Hamilton shows just how this happens. Furthermore, many complaints about journalism--media bias, soft news, and pundits as celebrities--arise from the impact of this economic logic on news judgments.
This is the first book to develop an economic theory of news, analyze evidence across a wide range of media markets on how incentives affect news content, and offer policy conclusions. Media bias, for instance, was long a staple of the news. Hamilton's analysis of newspapers from 1870 to 1900 reveals how nonpartisan reporting became the norm. A hundred years later, some partisan elements reemerged as, for example, evening news broadcasts tried to retain young female viewers with stories aimed at their (Democratic) political interests. Examination of story selection on the network evening news programs from 1969 to 1998 shows how cable competition, deregulation, and ownership changes encouraged a shift from hard news about politics toward more soft news about entertainers.
Hamilton concludes by calling for lower costs of access to government information, a greater role for nonprofits in funding journalism, the development of norms that stress hard news reporting, and the defining of digital and Internet property rights to encourage the flow of news. Ultimately, this book shows that by more fully understanding the economics behind the news, we will be better positioned to ensure that the news serves the public good.
Author Bio
James T. Hamilton is the Hearst Professor of Communication, Chair of the Department of Communication, and Director of the Stanford Journalism Program.
His books on media markets and information provision include All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News (Princeton, 2004), Regulation Through Revelation: The Origin, Politics, and Impacts of the Toxics Release Inventory Program (Cambridge, 2005), and Channeling Violence: The Economic Market for Violent Television Programming (Princeton, 1998). His most recent book, Democracy's Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism (Harvard, 2016), focuses on the market for investigative reporting. Through research in the field of computational journalism, he is also exploring how the costs of story discovery can be lowered through better use of data and algorithms.
He is co-founder of the Stanford Computational Journalism Lab, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, affiliated faculty at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, and member of the JSK Fellowships Board of Visitors.
For his accomplishments in research, he has won awards such as the David N Kershaw Award of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, the Goldsmith Book Prize from the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center (twice), the Frank Luther Mott Research Award (twice), the Tankard Book Award, and a Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Fellowship.
Teaching awards from Harvard, Duke, and Stanford include the Allyn Young Prize for Excellence in Teaching the Principles of Economics, Trinity College Distinguished Teaching Award, Bass Society of Fellows, Susan Tifft Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring Award, and School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, Hamilton taught at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, where he directed the De Witt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. He earned a BA in Economics and Government (summa cum laude) and PhD in Economics from Harvard University.
Education
Ph.D., Harvard University, Economics (1991)
B.A., Harvard University, Economics and Government (1983)
Source: Stanford University
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