Journalism in the Digital Age: Theory and practice for broadcast, print and online media Review

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Journalism in the Digital Age: Theory and practice for broadcast, print and online media ReviewThe author has the rare ability to convey his ideas in terse, lucid and precise language. They will define the future of journalism in the information age as a result of rapid advances in telecom technology.Journalism in the Digital Age: Theory and practice for broadcast, print and online media OverviewProvides the practical techniques and theoretical knowledge that underpin the fundamental skills of a journalist. It also takes a highly modern approach, as the convergence of broadcast, print and online media require the learning of new skills and methods. The book is written from an international perspective - with examples from around the world in recognition of the global marketplace for today's media. This is an essential text for students on journalism courses and professionals looking for a reference that covers the skill, technology and knowledge required for a digital and converged media age. The book's essence lies in the way essential theories such as ethics and law, are woven into practical newsgathering and reporting techniques, as well as advice on management skills for journalists, providing the wide intellectual foundation which gives credibility to reporting.Combines skills and theory for radio, TV, print and on-line media Shows how journalists can work with converged media Gives essential theory, ethics, law and management skills alongside the practical techniques: interviewing, writing, reporting and newsgathering

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Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball Review

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Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball ReviewThis year's revelations about rampant steroid use in Major League Baseball has escalated to the point that virtually every professional who played during the past decade automatically comes under suspicion (especially the power sluggers). As a longtime baseball fan, I've found this perpetual witch hunt irritating and have rapidly grown tired of the media obsession and with the subsequent inevitable and often irrational rants by politicians and sports fans. Even more galling is MLB Commissioner Bud Selig posing before Congress about his "strong" efforts to clean up the game, and his hypocritical tough posturing proposed through the media after the hearings. These are tough times for hardcore fans, and many of us would like to bury our heads in the sand and just enjoy the current pennant races.
But that has become impossible. Jose Canseco's "tell all" book, the February Congressional hearings, and media coverage have all put baseball's steroid scandal on the front page of the nation's sports section.
Steroids headlines another landmark moment in baseball history-akin to the gambling scandals (personified by the 1919 Chicago Black Sox) as well as the demarcation of an era when power hitting proliferated beyond reason (radically opposite the "dead ball era" of the early 20th century and the "pitchers' era" of the 1960's). But to follow the complicated story through ESPN and print journals only leads to confusion and misperceptions. Thus, Boston Herald sports columnist Howard Bryant comes to the rescue with his remarkably perceptive Juicing the Game that provides the necessary background and historical perspective to understand the issue-making this the most timely baseball book of 2005.
Bryant primarily frames his narrative around the decade that follows Major League Baseball's unfortunate 1994 strike that canceled the World Series that season, but to create an accurate picture requires a great deal of background. Bryant paints this in concisely (covering MLB's recent commissioners, influential owners and executives, major figures in the player's union and umpire's union, and the issues of that strike) before moving on to what Selig referred to as "Baseball's Renaissance" but will more certainly go down as "Baseball's Steroids Era."
Recently most of the fan talk has centered around Barry Bonds, Rafael Palmeiro, Jason Giambi, and other power sluggers who have admitted steroids use whether inadvertently or intentionally. Bryant delineates pertinent details on these players and others to give a much clearer visual picture of the issue, but he also astutely selects earlier indications of baseball's changing climate. Just how does a relatively light hitting Brady Anderson all of a sudden slug 50 homers in 1996? While MLB tried to pass this off as evidence of a livelier ball, smaller ballparks, improved nutrition, and weight training, the clarion call had been sounded all around MLB and its minor leagues.
Using his journalistic skills and wide-ranging contacts, Bryant offers irrefutable statistics and anecdotal evidence that clearly demonstrates just how such a huge change and development could lie "hidden" by baseball officials for so long. Few escape blame, for a wide ranging array of people benefited from baseball's sudden surge in home run power, and the boundaries go far beyond baseball-from Congressional laws concerning supplements, to baseball's beat writers who looked the other way to retain their team access, to society's faddish interest in health and weight training. Some teams (like the Arizona Diamondbacks, Oakland A's, and St. Louis Cardinals) even supplied free creatine to their players.
Despite the wide ranging forces that all converged to allow baseball to fall into complicity with steroid use, Bryant levels the most pointed criticism at the MLB Commissioner: "Bud Selig is out of control. His renaissance is in a shambles. He is flailing, grasping, angry. He is lost, swallowed whole by a phenomenon he never took the time to understand until after the fatal damage had been inflicted. If the notion of a tainted era and its full implications had not penetrated him fully before despite his jousts with McCain and the BALCO debacle, the devastation following the Canseco book shatters his calm . . . For nearly ten years, Bud Selig had referred to the decade as a renaissance, and now he is telling the public not to look back at the past. The thing to do is move forward, he says. The talk of a cover-up during his administration grows louder."
A thoroughly compelling read, Bryant has penned the definitive text about steroid use in our national pastime. Certainly the San Francisco Chronicle deserves accolades for breaking the BALCO story with its deep sources, but Bryant's work is also Pulitzer Prize worthy for taking an extremely complex issue and providing the historical and societal context to put this into proper perspective-an amazing accomplishment for a story that continues to unfold. Readers will find that they won't have to enhance their brain cells with ginkgo biloba to decipher Juicing the Game: Drugs Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball. All that is necessary is an interest in the game, its history, and its integrity.Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball Overview

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All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News Review

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All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News ReviewHaving last studied economics as an undergraduate many years ago, I was partially prepared to understand the perspective from which Prof. Hamilton analyzes news, its content, and the market forces dictating that content and its distribution in "All the News That's Fit to Sell". As a citizen concerned with the body politic and its seeming habit of voting against its own long-term economic interests, I was more than curious to understand how, in an age when access to information is almost limitless, people continue to subscribe to political falsehoods and half-truths propagated by our elected officials.
Hamilton throws us into the deep end of economic theory right away by observing that "news is a commodity... a product shaped by forces of supply and demand," and thus amenable to market theory to "predict the content of news and evaluate its impact on society." In this way, he wants to show "how consumers' desires drive news coverage and how this conflicts with ideals of what the news ought to be."
First, Hamilton places news within the larger category of information goods--goods characterized by being public and experience goods, by product dimension differentiation, and by high fixed costs/low variable costs. These characteristics help explain how market forces determine what becomes news. At the consumer end, Hamilton borrows from Anthony Downs to identify four information demands, i.e. reasons people desire information: consumption, production, entertainment, and voting. For the first three demands, consumption of the news realizes its benefit. For voting, however, the economic cost of investing the time and effort to inform oneself on each of the candidates and their positions does not justify the probability that that individual's vote will change the final election outcome, leading to Downs's conclusion "that voters do not demand information on policy details and choose to remain 'rationally ignorant'."
Although recent percentage voter turnout and the public's relative lack of political awareness seemingly bears out Downs's dismal analysis, enough Americans demand political information such that the market provides outlets for "hard news". In Hamilton's formulation, "hard news" contains high levels of public affairs information while "soft news" contains very little or none.
This sets up the main thrust of the book: how we can use economics to model media content and predict market failures, i.e. those types of news coverage likely to be underproduced, and what are the ultimate costs of these failures. This assumes, of course, that one can place a standard of value on outcomes of news coverage and consumption. This element of subjectivity "means that economics yields partial, not final, answers in questions about news coverage." But, "If one is willing to make assumptions about media effects and stipulate particular ends for media policy,... then economics can provide more help in the design of policies chosen to achieve a given set of outcomes." In so many words, Hamilton seems to be using economics to find ways to increase both the production and consumption of unbiased hard news. After exhaustive analyses of news demographics and content, their effects on voting outcomes, and of how market forces, along with deregulation and centralization, have slowly turned hard news into empty partisan posturing and entertainment fluff, Hamilton offers some solutions, including lower the cost of access to information, change the conditions under which broadcasters receive broadcasting licenses, subsidize information markets, devote public resources towards providing information, create norms that reward hard news reporting, and stimulate demand for information through education and advertising.
"All the News That's Fit to Sell" offers the hopeful message that greater access to unbiased information will lead to better political outcomes. With the increasing political participation of religious dogmatists and other rigid ideologues who have already found their versions of the truth, the need for greater public participation and interest in public policy has never been greater, and Hamilton's book provides a framework for understanding and realizing that goal.All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News Overview
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.


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Robber Baron: Lord Black of Crossharbour Review

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Robber Baron: Lord Black of Crossharbour ReviewI expected to read about the charges and the trial since the book is entitled Robber Baron but the most of the book is just a rehash of Black's own autobiography and it also is a bio of sorts of his wife Barbara Amiel. This has been written about before by both Amiel and Black, so it's not much fun reading the whole thing over again for those of us who have already read the respective autobios of the 2 main characters. Also, the author did have some interviews with Black, and claims Black trusted him and no other journalist, but considering the title of the book, poor Black should not have trusted yet another journalist wanting to make a buck through selling a book. I am sure after this one Black will not trust journalists, period. In all fairness, I have not finished the book yet, but I am finding it difficult to get through some of the long drawn-out and boring chapters.Robber Baron: Lord Black of Crossharbour OverviewBased on rigorous research, hard-hitting interviews, and original documents, this biography stands out as the most complete examination of Conrad Black, builder of the world's third-largest media empire, the Telegraph Group. Author George Tombs not only worked in Black's empire, but maintained steady communication with him over the years as a journalist, giving him exclusive access and insight into Black's opinions, ideas, values, and personality. Including 100 pages of annotated transcripts from Black's most recent fraud trial in Chicago, this up-to-date biography gives an inside view of the mogul's struggles and successes, throughout his past and into the present.

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