Columbia Global Reports
Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy
Key Metrics
- Margaret Sullivan
- Columbia Global Reports
- Paperback
- 9781733623780
- 7.4 X 4.9 X 0.5 inches
- 0.3 pounds
- Business & Economics > Industries - Media & Communications
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
An Epidemic of News Deserts and Ghost Papers
Ghosting the News tells the most troubling media story of our time: How democracy suffers when local news dies. From 2004 to 2015, 1,800 print newspaper outlets closed in the US. One in five news organizations in Canada has closed since 2008. One in three Brazilians lives in news deserts. The absence of accountability journalism has created an atmosphere in which indicted politicians were elected, school superintendents were mismanaging districts, and police chiefs were getting mysterious payouts. This is not the much-discussed fake-news problem--it's the separate problem of a critical shortage of real news.
America's premier media critic, Margaret Sullivan, charts the contours of the damage, and surveys a range of new efforts to keep local news alive--from non-profit digital sites to an effort modeled on the Peace Corps. No nostalgic paean to the roar of rumbling presses, Ghosting the News instead sounds a loud alarm, alerting citizens to a growing crisis in local news that has already done serious damage.
Author Bio
Margaret Sullivan is the media columnist for The Washington Post. Before joining The Post, she was the New York Times public editor, and previously the chief editor of the Buffalo News, her hometown paper, where she started as a summer intern.
She is a graduate of Georgetown University and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. She was a member of the Pulitzer Prize board from 2011 to 2012, and was twice elected as a director of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, where she led the First Amendment committee. While living in Manhattan, Sullivan taught in the graduate schools of journalism at Columbia University and the City University of New York.
Source: Washington Post
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