Young Journalists Research Articles

Media literacy of adults in the function of lifelong learning: the bad sides of the weather forecast

In our era, the epoch of the mass media, the simplest and the most complex knowledge and experience is being increasingly presented or jointly shaped by young journalists, junior editors or relatively young media owners. The state of youth generally corresponds with more insufficiently articulated bright and classic, literary and timeless knowledge. Furthermore, the state of youth, which dominates the mass media scene in our environment, does not have enough field of experience as important guideline of a good professionalism. In theory, good information is a result of three journalist’s experience: the experience of a specific message (event), the earlier experience and pervious level of education. Now, how to compensate the leak of one of those elements on everyday basis? I am going to analyse a very simple, generally known and very important example in the „world of life” – the matter of „weather forecast” or „weather information”. It is becoming important yet even more sensational. For media credibility, even regarding this information, the classic and background knowledge is exceedingly important in addition to modern views „through telescopes-satellites”.

Re-writing the future: Five young journalists from around the world

Re-writing the future: Five young journalists from around the world

The predicament of Young Journalists: The study of Portugal

This article attempts to draw a portrait of young Portuguese journalists. Who are these young professionals dedicated to a profession which is in turmoil? The reasons for the instability of the sector are many and varied. We could mention the trend towards media concentration into business groups: the resulting mergers lead to diminish the importance of journalists, which in turn leads to contraction of the job market. An issue which is proving intractable is the job insecurity affecting mainly younger journalists – those who actually get the jobs, since there are large numbers of journalism graduates who run up against almost insurmountable barriers to make an entry into the profession. Power relations in the editing rooms are also changing. Relations with supervisors become impersonal, mediated by editors or managers who may not have an access to the board of directors. Within the profession, there are certain facets which differentiate one generation of journalists from another. The new information technologies also play an important role here: in addition to exponentially strengthening the dominance of time management, they completely transform communication models based on the traditional media. The role of the journalist becomes more elusive. In other words, the traditional mediating role of the journalist is disappearing.

Book Review: Citizen Journalism: Valuable, Useless or Dangerous?, edited by Melissa Wall

Citizen Journalism: Valuable, Useless or Dangerous? Melissa Wall, ed. New York: International Debate Education Association, 2012. 180 pp. $24.95 pbk.Recently, many newspapers and other media institutions have lost credibility and dis- appeared or downsized, reducing the number of journalists on traditional payrolls. At the same time, social media, blogs, and other Internet-related entities have multiplied and have sought to fill the resulting news vacuum. Amateur or citizen journalists have found many new outlets for their photos and stories.This thin volume provides an overview of how and why citizen journalism has devel- oped and has covered particular events and issues in at least ten nations and regions. Seventeen scholars from around the world authored or co-authored chapters. Melissa Wall, a professor of journalism at California State University, Northridge, served as editor.The overall picture is very mixed. Citizen journalists have provided real-time descriptions of events and subcultures seldom if ever covered adequately by tradi- tional media. However, the absence of journalistic background, editing, and quality control have often led to biased, inaccurate, low-quality pieces.Positive contributions to the public sphere include the following:* Reports of ruthless seizure of land by a local government in northern Taiwan. Traditional media had ignored the seizure, but reporting on a television service inviting citizen input called PeoPo triggered mass protests and eventually led to changes in the relevant law. PeoPo was a creation of Taiwan's Public Television Service established to challenge and enhance the basically free but sensational- istic and often irresponsible commercial media on the island.* Coverage of the 2009 Israeli invasion of Gaza with citizen input encouraged by Al Jazeera, one of the few media institutions with access to the area. Investigative pieces revealed what life was like in Gaza in ways not really consistent with much western emphasis on objectivity and brevity.* Blogs by U.S. soldiers stationed in Afghanistan during the war in that country. These bloggers revealed a great deal about military life and its subculture. Some critics felt citizen journalists would be free to question official reports that the U.S. troops were contributing in a positive way to democratization, to winning hearts and minds. However, intensive study of forty-eight soldier blogs indicated they served more of a guard-dog function, supporting the official line, than a watchdog role challenging it.* Cell-phone transmissions by young people in a poor South African community, Grahamstown, showed what life was like among the poor and mostly unem- ployed young people there. Under a program established in part by the Rhodes University School of Journalism and Media Studies, many of these reports appeared in newspapers and on television. Students received training in telling stories and other activities, yielding a better understanding of journalism overall.* Training camps for young journalists in Taiwan under auspices of the Public Television Service there. Students from twelve different schools of journalism participated, contributing many stories that appeared in traditional media.* Social-media portrayal of a young Iranian woman, Neda Agha Soltan, being shot and killed during a crackdown on protests against the allegedly rigged 2009 re- election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The image of Neda lying in a pool of blood soon went viral on the Internet, helping to make her an iconic martyr. CNN and other traditional media quickly circulated the story. …

Book Review: Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement, by Aniko Bodroghkozy

Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement. Aniko Bodroghkozy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. 280 pp. $50 hbk.Why should rising young journalists of the Internet, Facebook, and Twitter age care about television shows and reporting from the bygone era of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States? In a compelling, well-researched book, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement, Aniko Bodroghkozy points to the persistent chal- lenges that television actors, producers, and news program reporters grappled with then, with lessons for the present and future. Bodroghkozy's accounts of how racism wove its way into televised narratives' contrasting myths and the imagination of American life with facts of its often unequal, lived reality are gripping.Bodroghkozy is an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. She has published widely on American film and television, focusing on social justice movements from the 1950s to the 1970s. In Equal Time, she traces key televised moments in the U.S. Civil Rights movement, from its absence from early entertainment programs, to its being prime time viewing material for the televised debacle at Selma's Edmund Pettus bridge. She notes the stalemate for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the movement in the bloodless, hence televisually unengrossing, reports of the failed Albany campaign for voting rights.In news reporting, she contends television served up images of individual worthy black victims for white audiences to perceive as aspirational civil rights subjects. She analyzes racial normalizing through specific, if inaccurate, camera pans of trium- phant interracial participants of the March on Washington in 1963, and events culmi- nating with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and beyond. Examining real news events as a foil against which audiences would compare the idealized, often minstrelsy por- trayals of African-Americans living with whites, she brings readers into an intimate world of denial and engagement with America's racist practices.Bodroghkozy recounts with vivid details longstanding problems of racial, ethnic stereotyping in televised entertainment and news programs, finding structural and cul- tural obstacles to fair and balanced reporting. She demonstrates the lack of truly radical shows that could have burst the white power bubble in pop culture. Such difficulties continue to be faced in the ever segmented, fragmented world of present- day television and within the larger, multimedia landscape linking cell phones, web- sites, and other emerging technologies. For these reasons, this book would be an excellent addition to classes covering issues connecting infotainment with race and class. Bodroghkozy analyzes the ways pervasive attitudes creep into, and are perpetu- ated by, key decision-making members in television production.Her method combines textual analysis of both news reports and sit-com prototypes, and later, more established television shows like Good Times, with audience analysis from texts ranging from internal studio memos to audience letters to producers. Bodroghkozy recreates for readers the preferred media frames of the time. …

SOCIAL VIGILANCE OF SCHOOL JOURNALISTS: COGNITIVE ASPECT

In the article one of the stages and results of an ascertaining experiment aimed at identification of the level of high school students’ social vigilance formation are described. The scientific novelty of this work is to implement the pedagogical interpretation of the concept "social vigilance", and also in the selection and creation of valid methods for studying the phenomenon. Ascertaining experiment on cognitive criteria included a test on facts of social reality knowledge, the methods developed by the author "The analysis of the communicative situation," and “Continue the report”, content analysis of texts. The results show that teenagers’ social vigilance largely developed in respect of the microprocesses, but it’s low in respect of macroprocesses. The young journalists have little knowledge about the various social groups, social stratum. The obtained data show the directions of teaching activities to develop students’ social vigilance. Experimental results, methods and forms of research can be extrapolated to other types of educational activities. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12731/2218-7405-2013-7-49

Labor Conditions of Young Journalists in Romania: A Qualitative Research

Young journalists in Romania face difficult labor conditions in media institutions, in the context of the concentration of media ownership in very few hands and of a post-communist media lacking a tradition of regulation and journalistic standards. This paper will focus on the working conditions of young Romanian journalists in the Internet era. The research is based on 30 semi- structured interviews related to work procedures, wages, professional standards, and digital work. Previous research work carried out on Romanian journalists will be also taken into consideration.

COMMENTARY: A trauma shake-up: Are NZ graduates being prepared for the real world?

Young journalists today are highly likely to cover traumatic incidents early in their careers, with many confronting trauma day to day. This pressure is exacerbated in the current economic climate and fast-paced changing world of journalism. New Zealand graduates are no exception. Few are prepared by their journalism schools to deal with trauma. Should they be taught these skills during their training or should they wait until they are in the workplace? Research has recommended the former for at least two decades. Perhaps it is time New Zealand caught up with many American and Australian journalism schools and introduced changes to the journalism curricula to ensure graduates are equipped with skills to recognise signs of stress in themselves as well as victims. The workplace can support this training with recognition and support, which has been shown to improve productivity and resilience.

THE CONCEPT OF SHADOW IN LATGALIAN CULTURE SPACE

THE CONCEPT OF SHADOW IN LATGALIAN CULTURE SPACE

Book Review: Reporters Who Made History: Great American Journalists on the Issues and Crises of the Late 20th Century by Steven M. Hallock

Reporters Who Made History: Great American Journalists on the Issues and Crises of the Late 20th Century. Steven M. Hallock. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. 332 pp. $54.95 hbk.Steven M. Hallock, an assistant professor of journalism at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, looks at fifty years of American history through the words and memories of ten journalists who covered it.For each decade, Hallock has selected two journalists with a wide range of experiences and backgrounds. They include men and women who were print editors and reporters, syndicated columnists, and broadcasters. Hallock weaves together personal interviews as well excerpts from their memoirs and stories to tell about the most important events of the late twentieth century.Although the book is titled Reporters Who Made History, not all of those featured made history themselves and not all were reporters when they made their mark. For example, Ben Bradlee was an editor, and Ellen Goodman, Georgie Anne Geyer, and David Broder were columnists writing about the political and social upheavals of their time.Hallock asked each journalist to name the most important events of the late twentieth century in the areas of crime, politics, society, law, entertainment, sports, medicine, and foreign affairs. He also asked them to comment on changes they saw in the journalism profession. Their answers are not too surprising: the Civil Rights movement, the Cold War, the Red Scare, the ascendancy of television, and the fall of communism top the journalists' list of important developments.More interesting are the journalists' reflections on their careers. While much of it has been previously published in biographies and memoirs, pulled together in this study themes emerge that are instructive to today's young journalists: the men and women in this book exhibited a passion for reporting the truth, a willingness to work hard and take risks, and enjoyed a fair amount of luck. Hallock tries to situate each journalist within his or her time period by reporting the news headlines on the day each was born. Although at times this device feels a bit tedious, it does serve to remind the reader that even journalists are shaped by their times.After an overview chapter, Hallock starts his decade-by-decade study in the 1950s with former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis and White House correspondent Helen Thomas. Lewis discusses the nascent Civil Rights movement and his coverage of the Red Scare, including his Pulitzer Prize-winning series about a Maryland man who lost his job after being deemed a security risk. Thomas, meanwhile, describes her start as a political reporter during World War II and the advent of the Cold War and offers her views on the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. Hallock's book predates her retirement following controversial remarks on Jews and Palestinians. …

A SUITABLE CASE FOR TRANSPLANT?

Can the values of public service journalism be transplanted to a society emerging from dictatorship? This paper is the first detailed account of the BBC's engagement with journalism in Romania after the fall of communism, including a description and evaluation of the journalism training carried out by the BBC in the country in the 1990s. Drawing on interviews with a cohort of journalists who were trained at the BBC School in Bucharest, it describes the media landscape from which they came and charts their professional progress after attending the training course. Their disillusionment with the decline in journalistic standards in Romania in the late 1990s is put in the context of wider assessments of the state of Romanian media in the run-up to the country's joining the European Union in 2005. Initiatives to establish and support a model of public service broadcasting in Romania after the “revolution” of 1989 were seen as part of a wider effort to build an open society. While Romania's goals of joining NATO and the European Union were achieved by 2005, there is considerable evidence of its continuing failure to respect the norms of liberal democracy. This paper investigates the reasons why the journalistic values which the BBC taught to 500 young Romanian journalists did not take root in the country's media and asks what lessons can be learned for similar interventions 20 years on.

Towards New Goals in European Journalism Education

Journalism is involved in substantial change caused by technological, social and economic developments, which lead to the need for innovation at every level: the working process, the content of the product, the form of the product, the public, the platform that is used to get the message across and the profession as a whole. For each of these elements of journalism we attribute one of the following major innovations: Transparency, navigation, storytelling, participation, crossmedia and entrepreneurship. In which way will these innovations have an effect on the learning goals in European journalism education, according to professional journalists? Our research shows that there is a large consensus among European professionals concerning the future key qualifications for young journalists. Furthermore, there is not much evidence that a majority of European journalists is ready to make the jump to renewal, perhaps with the exception of online journalists. Most professional journalists across Europe appear to hold a rather traditional view on their profession.

New Media and Democratisation

New Media and Democratisation John Doyle Centre for International Studies, School of Law and Government, Dublin City University This issue of Irish Studies in International Affairs opens with a collection of articles on the question of 'New Media and Democratisation', drawing on a series of papers presented at the annual conference of the Royal Irish Academy's Committee for International Affairs, held in Dublin in November 2011. The 'traditional' media coverage of the Arab Spring emerging across North Africa and the Middle East during 2011 started a high-level debate on the actual and potential impact of social media in facilitating communication and mobilisation internally in authoritarian states, and also in allowing activists to communicate internationally. The international communication might ultimately have been the more significant (due to limited access to means of communication internally), as it gave media organisations and international activists direct access to information and, crucially for the media, powerful images that commanded widespread attention. Combined with the broad support for internal protests in some countries in the region, this made it very difficult for those states who traditionally lent support to the authoritarian leaders, who they perceived to be better allies than popularly elected Islamist parties, to continue such support. Using the changes in the Arab world as a starting point, Professor Philip Seib (from the University of Southern California), one of the leading international figures on public diplomacy, explores the pressures for diplomacy from, first of all, the vast range of information sources now available to policy-makers and their advisors, and also from the expectations of speed from a public used to getting 'instant' news updates. His analysis of the tensions created by the competing pressures of instant response and the need for careful analysis is an extremely valuable contribution to this debate. Of course, the debate on new media and democratisation goes far beyond the Arab spring. I§il Turkan (Science Po Aix-en-Provence and Bah?e§ehir University, Istanbul), using Turkey as a case study, highlights the tensions caused by a relatively accessible 'new' media in situations where the work of journalists is constrained, not only by controls in advance of publication but also by threats afterwards. Christian Christensen (Uppsala University) provides a very interesting discussion on the ways in which the Swedish government has rationalised offering not only diplomatic but also material support to 'net activists' working on the Arab Spring, and he seeks to analyse the extent to which the Swedish government utilised what is called a 'liberation technology' Irish Studies in International Affairs, Vol. 23 (2012), 1-4. doi: 10.3318/ISIA.2012.23.1 2 Irish Studies in International Affairs perspective on the use of social media in the service of democratic change. In another angle on the role of new media, Michael Foley, Nóirín Hayes and Brian O'Neill (Dublin Institute of Technology) describe a training programme for young journalists in Turkey, Romania, Georgia, Macedonia, Serbia, Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan, which sought to imbed a children's rights perspective into journalists' training, using new media both in the delivery of training and as an opportunity for building alternative journalism platforms. Bringing these debates back to Ireland, Paul Candon (Trinity College Dublin) explored the use of online intervention in the 2011 Irish general election to examine the extent to which online media represented a new 'public sphere', promoting greater accountability and deeper democratisation. His conclusion highlights the very limited extent to which this actually occurred and is an important counter to the overly exaggerated stories of 'Twitter revolutions'. He does, however, also highlight the increasing use of new media for organisational purposes by political organisations. Ireland is not simply just one other country dealing with a global phenomenon. Behind the construction led elements of the Irish economic boom was a much more sustainable focus on information and communication technologies, and any economic recovery from Ireland's current crisis will need to be grounded in a 'knowledge economy'. The universities will need to play a crucial role here, not only as knowledge generators in new technologies, but more fundamentally in developing a culture of enquiry and problem-solving to deliver a knowledge-based society, and this has...

The Impact of a Converged Media Landscape on the Education of Young Journalists

The Impact of a Converged Media Landscape on the Education of Young Journalists

Newspaper journalism in crisis: Burnout on the rise, eroding young journalists’ career commitment

The three-component Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey was implemented to examine burnout among newspaper journalists ( N = 770). With a moderate rate of exhaustion, a high rate of cynicism and a moderate rate of professional efficacy, journalists demonstrate higher rates of burnout than presented in previous work. Additionally, journalists expressing intentions to leave the profession ( n = 173) demonstrated high rates of exhaustion and cynicism, and moderate rates of professional efficacy, making them ‘at-risk’ for burnout. Also, 74.5 percent of journalists 34 and younger ( n = 223) either expressed intentions to leave newspaper journalism or answered ‘don’t know’. The most ‘at-risk’ to burnout appear to be young copy editors or page designers working at small newspapers.

Need for Speed onto Internet Clashes with Journalistic Values

Interviews with U.S. newspaper journalists reveal that along with online initatives, newsroooms are experiencing organizational transformation. Young journalists are driving it and have adopted the online initiatives as older journalists continue to struggle.

Learning through ‘Prosuming’

In today's new media landscape, consuming media content is only part of the equation. Media consumers also enjoy various avenues by which they can produce and share media content. This combination of consuming and producing has been termed ‘prosuming’. Rather than being the preserve of the intellectual elite, virtually any media consumer can be a media producer too given the relative affordability and accessibility of new ICT and media platforms. Media production is satisfying because it allows individuals to flex their creative energies and empowering because it enables people to make their views heard. Focusing on media literacy programmes targeted at developing country youth, this article analyses media literacy programmes that impart media production skills. Specifically, it looks at the Little Masters programme in China, the Cybermohalla programme in India, and the Young Journalists (YOJO) Group in Vietnam. The article finds that media literacy programmes that emphasise media production may have more significant long-term impacts as they vest young people with the abilities to voice their concerns and raise public awareness about youth-related issues. The media literacy skills imparted are, therefore, imbued with the potential for social activism and democratisation. The experiences of the Little Masters, Cybermohalla and YOJO programmes also suggest a few strategies for heightened success–sensitivity to the social and cultural contexts of the participants, building up a sufficiently wide base of community support, and leveraging media convergence to increase their impact.

“They're in for a Rude Awakening”

That's what a recent graduate of a Big 12 journalism school recently told me about graduates coming out of journalism programs these days-about their need to know about media management and economics. I think those of us who teach media management and/or media economics, and those of us who do not teach it but think they important for students to know, have been somewhat remiss in not pressing our case. And, like my Big 12 alumnus friend, I think the need for young journalists to know about and understand it is more important than ever. Media economics both allowing and forcing changes in media technologies, and media technologies both allowing and forcing changes in media economics. And a major reason why traditional news media, entertainment media, and other media companies threatened by new technologies is because of a great deal of bad management, especially but not only in the newspaper and broadcast television industries. Finally, if, how, and how well they responding also is due to the quality of management. I don't know about enrollments in media management courses at many other universities, although from what I hear, others in the same boat: when I teach Newspaper & Magazine Management at Point Park University, with its more than 550 undergraduate and graduate JM and sometimes have a passable grasp of ratings, shares, audited circulations, CPMs, and/or other quantitative information about mass communication, might realize that it is media management and media economics that will determine their fates, in addition to public needs and wants, professional standards and practices, and (at least with regard to all electronic media) government regulation or lack thereof. The most common reason I hear from print journalism students about why they don't take the course is that they don't think they will ever be in management, and some go so far as to say they don't want to be in management. (That today's young people claim to be nonmaterialistic might have something to do with this, but there many reasons to work in management besides having a higher salary.) If I had the opportunity to talk to each student who could take my Newspaper & Magazine Management course but doesn't, my first point would be that many newspaper editors, newspaper publishers, magazine editors, and magazine publishers (not to mention people in middle management) also at some point-perhaps for a long time-said and thought the same thing. (We all know this is true in academia, too: think about how many department chairs and deans long thought they would never be there.) I would add that some of them won't know whether they like being in media management, or if they're any good at it, until after they have done it, but that is getting even more speculative than making an are prediction to a student about ending up in management. But let's take the student at her word: that she doesn't want to go into media management, and thinks the odds slim that she'll ever be there in any case. Over the years, I've made a number of other arguments to print journalism students about why they should know something about media management and economics. …

Editorial: British Journalism Review Trivia pursuit

'One of Nick Davies's informants for his book, Flat Earth News, is a trainee reporter on a regional daily tabloid, and he or she provides a diary of one 45½-hour working week. During it the reporter produced 48 stories of varying lengths and importance on the basis of only 26 conversations with informants, only four of whom were met face-to-face. Indeed, the reporter spent only three hours away from his desk, telephone and computer terminal, and most of the time was occupied in answering demands from the news desk to fill specific holes in the typical 24 pages of local news scheduled in each day's paper. The account suggests that much of this material is trivial and formulaic, to use no stronger terms... What does the future hold if newspapers and broadcasters do not encourage young journalists by allowing them to exercise their skills by using their minds to ask questions and assess the answers sceptically, intelligently and knowledgeably? Poorly trained and with little news judgement, the executives of tomorrow will produce anodyne newspapers and bulletins because that is all they know. And as the paying public wake up to the realisation that the traditional media are turning into mere processors of pseudo-news, they will surely abandon them, happy to find the truth by weighing up for themselves the mixture of fact, opinion and craziness that compete with each other in the free-for-all of cyberspace. If Davies's trainee is a harbinger of the end of news journalism as we know it, the coroner's verdict can be nothing other than suicide.'

Baseball and the Media (review)

Reviewed by: Baseball and the Media John Carvalho George Castle. Baseball and the Media. Bison Books. 2007. 266pp. $39.95 "You can observe a lot by watching," longtime baseball veteran Yogi Berra supposedly said. Sportswriter George Castle has observed the Chicago baseball media scene for almost 30 years - even longer if you include his phase as a print-hungry teenager. He chronicles many of these observations and changes in his recent book Baseball and the Media(Bison Books). Castle is among those baseball fans and newspaper journalists who look back wistfully at the mid-20th century, when baseball ruled sports and newspapers were the dominant medium. Thus, it would be easy for newbiesto write off Castle as two-fer, nostalgic in his disdain for the new media mix of cable and satellite television, hyper-sports talk radio, Internet information overload, and the intrusion of uber-orchestrated NBA and NFL media operations. But Castle's insights deserve more respect. The tradition he seeks to preserve is not the preeminence of print and baseball, but the interplay of athlete, journalist and audience/fan that made baseball journalism so lively, even into the 1970s and 1980s. To Castle, the issue is not that the media choices are increasing; it's that the distance between athletes and journalists and fans is expanding - the result of higher-paid athletes, lazy journalists, and [End Page 83]a fragmented sports audience. And for a sport like baseball, the distance is even more tragic. As Castle writes, "Yet part of the age-old appeal of baseball is its accessibility, both in person to fans and through the media. If the mainstays of the sport ever become as distant [as other celebrities], something is lost forever." In examining its topic, Baseball and the Mediasucceeds locally, but struggles globally. When Castle comments on the national scene, however, he lacks the anecdotes and his observations don't seem to have the same punch or depth. But when Castle traces the aforementioned evolution in the Chicago sports media scene (he writes for the Times of Northwest Indiana), even beyond baseball, he brings institutional memory along with insight – though at times, especially in describing his own career, he indulges in ax-grinding. The result is a lively insider's look at a sports media stage populated by such characters as Cubs manager Leo Durocher, broadcasting gadfly Harry Caray, NBA superstar Michael Jordan, and White Sox owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Bill Veeck. The journalists involved might lack name recognition, but their professional ethics and character quirks are familiar and entertaining. Similarly, when he focuses on his fellow baseball beat reporters, he skillfully compares and contrasts a variety of approaches to team coverage in newspapers. But the trend is still the same: things ain'twhat the way they were. Journalists in every medium, however, would do well to heed Castle's warnings. At every level, "fans lose in today's coverage of the game" (to quote the subtitle), because of a lack of engaging information. Whether it's loud sports talk radio superstars reluctant to face the athletes they criticize or inexperienced young journalists thrown unprepared into a pro clubhouse, the result is journalists unwilling to dig deep and build source relationships, as their predecessors did. At times, like any sportswriter, Castle lapses into cliché. He calls veteran pitcher Jamie Moyer "ancient Mariner lefty" and says that Dayton Daily Newsbaseball writer Hal McCoy "can sense a [End Page 84]story at fifty paces." The book also lacks historical detail beyond Castle's institutional memory. But the book is not intended to be sports media history. It is an instructional book within a loose "problem/solution" structure, designed to bring baseball reporting back to where it was. For those who have lost sight of what lively interviews can bring to a sports article, Castle also demonstrates that. It's impossible and time-consuming to count the number of baseball players, journalists and team officials interviewed for this book. Suffice to say that Castle is not a sports radio word-gush, spouting opinions. His reporting is solid and he shows a talent for getting his sources to speak honestly. In their book...