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By Peter Osnos
Excerpted from Foreign Affairs
In “Losing the News,” Alex Jones, who won a Pulitzer Prize while at The New York Times and is now director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, addresses how the rise of the Internet and the precipitous decline in advertising have left print journalism, especially big-city newspapers, in desperate straits.
Jones’ book presents what is at risk of being lost: what he calls “the iron core” of journalism, which comes from shoe-leather reporting, experience, and, often, courage. Jones calls this particular brand of journalism “accountability news…”
This genre of reporting stands apart from flip, glib, and entertaining opinion-driven commentary — the fast food that nourishes much of the blog culture, which is relatively cheap to produce compared to in-depth investigations and systematic coverage of local and national beats. Continue reading…
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Peter Osnos is Founder and Editor-at-Large of PublicAffairs Books, Vice Chair of the Columbia Journalism Review, and Senior Fellow for Media at the Century Foundation.