A Future for the News: What’s Wrong with Mainstream News Media in America and How to Fix It

A Future for the News: What’s Wrong with Mainstream News Media in America and How to Fix It investigates and offers solutions to significant problems with the productive functioning of the mainstream news media. Criticism of the mainstream news media is almost a national pastime in America, and widespread polling shows credibility ratings of journalists among the lowest of any institution in America, almost as low as that of Congress.

The institution of news media faces a plummeting morale of journalists; loss of readership; loss of viewers to competing, non-traditional venues for news; and so on. Moving from these problems to realistic solutions, this book serves as an instruction manual of sorts, with each chapter offering a pathway of improvement.

This collection brings together academics and news industry professionals with individual chapters taking a specific area of concern and making a case for particular solutions to the problems presented. Solutions range from ones designed for individual reporters to consider, to those that target newsrooms, the institution of journalism, and news consuming audiences. Together they aim to help a beleaguered institution restore itself as a fully functioning asset of the American Republic.

Contributors: Abe Aamidor, Brent Baker, Alex Christy, Jennifer Cox, Michelle Ferrier, John Gable, Katherine Haenschen, Michael Horning, Michael Max Knorpp, Jim A. Kuypers, Serena Miller, Cayce Myers, Stephen D. Perry, Soo Young Shin, Benjamin Voth, Adriel Warren.

Jim A. Kuypers is professor of communication in the School of Communication at Virginia Tech. He is the author, editor, or co-author of 16 books, including Purpose, Practice, and Pedagogy in Rhetorical Criticism (winner of the Everett Lee Hunt Award for Outstanding Scholarship) and Partisan Journalism: A History of Media Bias in the United States (a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2014). He is a former co-editor for the American Communication Journal. He is the recipient of the American Communication Association’s Outstanding Contribution to Communication Scholarship Award, the Southern States Communication Association’s Early Career Research award, and Dartmouth College’s Distinguished Lecturer Award.