What is happening to news : the information explosion and the crisis in journalism /

Alas, one assumes: another elegy for newspapers. Not so. In fact, Fuller offers a thoughtful, wide-ranging meditation on the medium's losing campaign for the eyeball. This intellectually ambitious book draws heavily on the work of Pulitzer Prize-winner Walter Lippmann in tandem with philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Fuller himself bleeds ink (son of a newspaperman, he was editor and publisher of Chicago Tribune before it fell prey to corporate interests), and he uses his newsroom experience well. But what makes this book different from many others of its kind are Fuller's deft carom shots off such thinkers as cognitive linguist Steven Pinker and researchers interested in how the brain processes media input. Fuller uses these resources to analyze, among many other things, the interplay of emotion and understanding as the mind reads a newspaper. This worthy addition to the journalism bookshelf will stand the test of time. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. C. A. Riley II Baruch College

The crisis in journalism is a hot topic for media scholars, and new books analyzing the situation are appearing monthly. Many cover familiar ground-the growth of the Internet, loss of advertising revenue, increasing corporate ownership, and changed reading behavior. Fuller, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, takes a different tack and explores how recent discoveries in neuroscience explain why traditional professional journalism no longer meets the needs of contemporary audiences. He argues that in an information-rich environment, the human brain will be attracted to "emotionally significant stimuli," or to sensational news rather than objective coverage. He recommends a complete rethinking of the objectivity standards and the development of a new rhetoric for news. Verdict Fuller's advocacy of both a redefinition of news and a more emotionally rich approach to its coverage will be controversial for many. Journalists and communication scholars trying to understand what is happening to news will want to read this book.-Judy Solberg, Seattle Univ. Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.