NRJ Book: The Form of News: A History

Abstract

The Form of News: A History By Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone (New York: The Guilford Press, 2001), 326 Promises, promises! This book, the publishers declare, suggests provocative ways to think about contemporary technologies that de-form old media. It addresses compelling questions about the newspaper's future in an era of declining civic No, it doesn't, but publishers can be forgiven for waxing overly poetically on book jackets and in news releases. The authors make no such promises and deliver a great deal more than their title suggests. They rewrite the performance history of newspapers in design terms, tracing their evolution from the printerly publications of the 1700s and early 1800s through the modern era. Barnhurst and Nerone do what they set out to do exceptionally well. They trace the graphic evolution of the newspaper and they trace the evolution of the newspaper's role in democratic civic culture. What they don't do is suggest, or even speculate on how * The newspaper may evolve in the new millennium. * Publishers might better serve to enhance civic culture. * Still-emerging technologies may reshape the newspaper. They leave us little better equipped than before to predict whether trend, counter-trend or something in between defines the fate of the newspaper in the U.S. The trend is well known. Daily newspaper circulation is less than half of what it was in 1950. The counter trend was underscored in a page one article by The Wall Street journal last summer: While the average newspaper reaches little more than half of its community's households, at least 44 reach more than 75 percent and as much as 112 percent. Their secret is no secret. The daily newspaper's only substantial and sustainable competitive advantage is its ability to gather and deliver consistently in-depth local news. Barnhurst and Nerone are not oblivious to these conditions: ... the modernist culture of newspapers has reached the brink of exhaustion. The sources of exhaustion lie deep in the internal structure of newspapers and in their external social, cultural and political environment: fear of competition from other media, the rise of news design as a fully institutionalized profession, the widespread challenge to modernist apparatuses of objectivity and expertise, the growing awareness of cultural heterogeneity, and the predictions of newspapers' demise in the face of the unlimited possibilities new technologies seem to provide. …