The Reconstruction of American Journalism
A report by
Leonard Downie, Jr.
Michael Schudson
Vice President at Large Professor
The Washington Post
Columbia University
Professor, Arizona State University Graduate School of JournalismOctober 20, 2009
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The Reconstruction of American Journalism
By Leonard Downie, Jr. and Michael SchudsonAmerican journalism is at a transformational moment, in which the era of dominant newspapers and influential network news divisions is rapidly giving wayto one in which the gathering and distribution of news is more widely dispersed.As almost everyone knows, the economic foundation of the nation’s newspapers,long supported by advertising, is collapsing, and newspapers themselves, whichhave been the country’s chief source of independent reporting, are shrinking—literally. Fewer journalists are reporting less news in fewer pages, and thehegemony that near-monopoly metropolitan newspapers enjoyed during the lastthird of the twentieth century, even as their primary audience eroded,
is ending.Commercial television news, which was long the chief rival of printed newspapers,has also been losing its audience, its advertising revenue, and its reportingresources.Newspapers and television news are not going to vanish in the foreseeablefuture, despite frequent predictions of their imminent extinction. But they will playdiminished roles in an emerging and still rapidly changing world of digital journalism, in which the means of news reporting are being reinvented, thecharacter of news is being reconstructed, and reporting is being distributed across agreater number and variety of news organizations, new and old. The questions that
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