THE NEXT JOURNALISM

THE NEXT JOURNALISM will reveal the elemental flaws in the way that journalism currently functions and offer ten groundbreaking ways in which it must change to correct those flaws. If journalists continue to preach to the public as paternalistic and omniscient narrators, the news media will not survive. And without a source of news that people trust, democratic society as we know it will follow suit. Those problems start with over-romanticizing the notion of the press as a watchdog. Not only does a barking dog create alarm rather than knowledge, it offers a distorted view of the world which is driving people away from the news. Journalism must now operate as a service in which the public is a partner, not a bystander. Journalists must recognize they are now more annotators of what people have already heard, not gatekeepers over what they know. As AI dawns as the next digital revolution, the news industry must begin to harness the data about civic life that the government already collects in order for people to better trust the process of gathering and reporting news. In utilizing this data and a more open dialogue, journalists must engage in the longer-term investigation of systemic issues which event-driven 20th century journalism was ill-equipped to do. Drawing evidence from groundbreaking studies at Princeton and the University of Maryland and real changes at innovative news organizations like KPCC in California, Outlier Media in Michigan and EDNC in North Carolina, THE NEXT JOURNALISM reveals what must be done for the future of information in this country. Rosenstiel is one of the world's most respected and recognized thinkers about the intersection of journalism and American politics. He spent a decade as the press critic for the Los Angeles Times, was chief congressional correspondent for Newsweek and co-founded the Pew Research Center. Tom is the author of classic journalism text, THE ELEMENTS OF JOURNALISM (in its 4th edition), which has sold 199,968 copies, and BLUR about the search for truth in the age of the internet. THE NEXT JOURNALISM is the natural and necessary next step in his saga of navigating the evolution of information and our perceptions of it. Currently, Tom is the Eleanor Merrill Scholar on the Future of Journalism at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago.