A recipe for journalism's fight back for public interest

Abstract

Reviewed book by: Martin Hirst Publication date: May, 2011

At the front of News 2.0, University of Queensland journalism professor Michael Bromley says this has ‘much needed grounded insight and foresight’. And as some academics’ writing about journalism seems to fit into a matrix of media theory few general readers could fully understand, a book dealing with what’s really going on in journalism is a great idea.

Martin Hirst of AUT University takes care to separate out what he calls a crisis in journalism from a commercial crisis in the news industry, while also making clear the ways in which the two are linked. He presents a concise and convincing account of how commercial pressure on the modern news media have made it hard, and in some cases impossible, to sustain the quality, depth and range of journalism the public have enjoyed in the past.