We use cookies to enhance your experience on our website. By continuing to use our website, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. You can change your cookie settings at any time. Find out more

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $132.00

Format:
Hardback
288 pp.
6.125" x 9.25"

ISBN-13:
9780190067076

Publication date:
February 2020

Imprint: OUP US


Reckoning

Journalism's Limits and Possibilities

Candis Callison and Mary Lynn Young

Series : Journalism and Political Comm Unbound

How do journalists know what they know? Who gets to decide what good journalism is and when it's done right? What sort of expertise do journalists have, and what role should and do they play in society? Until a couple of decades ago, journalists rarely asked these questions, largely because the answers were generally undisputed. Now, the stakes are rising for journalists as they face real-time critique and audience pushback for their ethics, news reporting, and relevance. Yet the crises facing journalism have been narrowly defined as the result of disruption by new technologies and economic decline. This book argues that the concerns are in fact much more profound.

Drawing on their five years of research with journalists in the U.S. and Canada, in a variety of news organizations from startups and freelancers to mainstream media, the authors find a digital reckoning taking place regarding journalism's founding ideals and methods. The book explores journalism's long-standing representational harms, arguing that despite thoughtful explorations of the role of publics in journalism, the profession hasn't adequately addressed matters of gender, race, intersectionality, and settler colonialism. In doing so, the authors rethink the basis for what journalism says it could and should do, suggesting that a turn to strong objectivity and systems journalism provides a path forward. They offer insights from journalists' own experiences and efforts at repair, reform, and transformation to consider how journalism can address its limits and possibilities along with widening media publics.

Readership : Students and scholars of journalism, communication studies, political communication, American studies, indigenous studies, and gender and media.

Introduction
1. Reckoning with the "View from Nowhere"
2. Battling for the Story
3. "Speculative" Memoir Fragments and Existential Dilemmas
4. Structure, Innovation, and Legacy Media
5. Startup Life
6. Indigenous Journalisms
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Candis Callison is an Associate Professor at the School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia. She is a citizen of the Tahltan Nation and a regular contributor to the podcast Media Indigena. She is also the author of How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation Fellow. Callison worked as a journalist in television, radio, and the Internet in both Canada and the United States.

Mary Lynn Young is an Associate Professor at the School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia. She is co-founder and board member of The Conversation Canada, a national not-for-profit journalism organization and affiliate of The Conversation global network. She is also co-author of Data Journalism and the Regeneration of News. Young worked as a business columnist and crime journalist at major daily newspapers in Canada and the United States.

Making Sense in the Social Sciences - Margot Northey, Lorne Tepperman and Patrizia Albanese
The Outrage Industry - Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj
Journalism and Truth in an Age of Social Media - Edited by James E. Katz and Kate K. Mays
Digital Feminist Activism - Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose and Jessalynn Keller
The Only Constant is Change - Ben Epstein

Special Features

  • Provides an original and sophisticated contribution to longstanding important debates about journalism methods, partial truths, and power.
  • Examines a wide range of journalism organizations: legacy, start-up, new global media, and Indigenous journalists.
  • Offers a novel critique related to race, gender, colonialism, journalism, and technology.
  • Written by scholars who have worked in prominent legacy and digital media.