Prologue

Abstract

Extract Early on in my newsroom career, first as a beat reporter and then as an investigative business reporter, I participated in a lot of industry perseverating over how to solve everything that was wrong with the industry. In my master’s program at Northeastern University, in the middle of that journalism career, I learned that even back in the 1940s, politicians, educators, academics, and media owners were wringing their hands at the state of journalism. Such a vital segment of our democracy seemed so vulnerable to conglomeration, sensationalism, advertiser influence, stereotyping, pack journalism, and a long list of ailments that needed fixing. Back in the 1920s–1940s, journalists hoped the cure would come in the form of muckraker journalism, and then it was New Journalism’s literary style in the 1960s and 1970s, and finally, during my 13-year stint, we were all gung-ho about public journalism in the late 1990s. All of it really, come to think about it, had a single goal: to build more trust in mainstream journalism. At one point, I owned a T-shirt that said “Trust me. I’m a journalist.” We wore such things sarcastically, of course.