essay journalism

Free Journalism Essay Examples & Topics

A journalism essay is a type of paper that combines personal records and reports. Besides news and facts, it should contain a story. An angle that creates a unique narrative of the events you are describing is crucial. However, let’s start with the definition.

No matter how often people hear about journalism, they still might get confused about what it is. It is an act of informative writing about news stories. It can be digital and non-digital, print and non-print. Journalists strive to present information in an interesting way while staying true to the source.

If you have seen journalistic article examples, you know there are two types. News can cover “hard stories”, meaning world events and politics, and “softer stories” about celebrities, science, etc. Journalism as a profession is multidimensional in nature. It can include texts, photography, interviews, and more. Content varies between different categories, such as literary reportage and yellow journalism.

Here, our experts have combined tips about how to write a good journalistic essay. We gathered information that will be useful for starting research and completing it. Moreover, you will find journalism topic ideas. You can use them for inspiration or to practice. Finally, underneath the article you will discover some stellar journalistic essay examples written by other students.

How to Write a Journalistic Essay

In this section, you’ll find tips that can help you start writing. However, nothing is more vital than choosing an appropriate journalism essay topic beforehand.

Before picking the subject, ask yourself several questions:

• What themes do I want to explore?
• What will my story be about?
• What points do I want to make?
• What is my attitude towards the topic?

Answering these questions can allow you to improve your storytelling. What’s more, look for one that can allow you to write intimately. Personal touches and views will influence your paper immensely. With all that in mind, try our free topic generator to get more ideas.

To write an outstanding journalistic essay, you should try these tips:

• Gather facts and references first.

Collect all the information you may need for your paper. For a story in journalism, you may be required to interview people or visit a location. Most importantly, you’ll have to research online. Also, you can read stories written by other people on the Internet to gain a better perspective.

• Organize your ideas and arguments before writing.

A good story is always organized. The structure of a journalistic should represent an inverted pyramid. The most crucial facts appear on the top, less important details go further, and extra information stays on the bottom. You can reflect in your writing. Organize all your arguments before writing, sticking to a logical structure.

• Rely on storytelling.

The story should become the main focus of your work. The writing should serve it and grab the reader’s attention from the start. Think about storytelling techniques that can keep your reader interested till the very end.

• Work on your style and language.

Another essential technique to keep your work both logical and engaging is to write in short sentences. If you search for any journalistic writing examples, you’ll see that’s how journalists write. The main goal of your paper is to deliver a clear and strong message. So, working on your style is going to help you further this agenda.

21 Journalism Essay Topics

There are so many journalism topics you can write about, and it can sometimes be challenging to stick to one. If you are still unsure what to describe and explore in your paper, this section can help you make this choice.

Here are some original journalism topic ideas:

• The way race impacts the news in different states in the US.
• Super Bowl as a phenomenon is more important than the game.
• Why people refuse to believe in climate change.
• How have sports changed international politics?
• Is creative writing in high school an essential subject?
• How vital is transparency in broadcast journalism?
• Is media responsible for the Covid-19 crisis in the US?
• Journalism as a profession can help change the world.
• A privacy issue between British journalism and the royal family.
• Are social media and blogging the future of journalism?
• The role of religion and race in Hollywood.
• Why has the Chinese economy risen so much over the past decade?
• How can media help in battling poverty in developing countries?
• Can music be used as political propaganda?
• Connections between social media and depression.
• Should mobile phones be allowed in educational institutions?
• Has the Internet impacted the way how newspapers and articles are written?
• Should fake news be banned on social media?
• What are the biggest challenges of investigative journalism?
• Can reality television be viewed as a type of journalism?
• How can athletes impact social awareness?

Thank you for reading the article! We hope you will find it helpful. Do not hesitate to share this article or a list of journalism essay examples with others. Good luck with your assignment!

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Journalism - List of Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

Journalism is the activity or profession of reporting about, photographing, or editing news stories for newspapers, magazines, radio, television, or online platforms. Essays on journalism could explore its history, ethical standards, and the evolving landscape in the digital age. Discussions might delve into the roles and responsibilities of journalists, the challenges posed by political biases, censorship, and the rapid spread of misinformation. Moreover, analyzing the impact of social media on journalism, the future of investigative journalism, and the interaction between journalism and democracy can provide a nuanced understanding of the vital role journalism plays in a functioning society. A vast selection of complimentary essay illustrations pertaining to Journalism you can find at Papersowl. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Gender Inequality in Broadcast Journalism

The news media is one of thea most powerful institution whichs that exerts a tremendous amount of influence on society. Although more women females are entering the male dominated newsroom, women are still underrepresented and excluded in many differentmultiple ways. It is evident that females hold a strong interest in journalism; in fact, sixty- five percent of journalism school graduates are female However, women only represent thirty percent of jobs in journalism. , Tand this gender disparity is evident in […]

Yellow Journalism Today

The word 'Yellow Journalism' was first heard in the 1890s to describe the methods and styles used by Joseph Pulitzer concerning the New York City newspaper. His competitor in the field of print media was William Randolph Hearst. Both authors were covering the exclamations of the war that created a lot of alarm among the people. They used powerful words on their headlines such as glory, slaughter, and death on the front page whenever possible to create curiosity and interest. […]

I Want to be a Journalist

The vocation of journalist is exceptionally fascinating and loaded with tremendous freedoms and degree. It is acquiring a lot of significance and renown in the cutting edge society. With the complex expansion in the course of papers and magazines just as beginning of papers and journals, there is an incredible breadth for the young fellows and ladies who need to join this calling. There are many openings every year for the new contestants. The expansion in the flow of papers […]

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How Yellow Journalism Resulted to the Spanish-American War

How yellow journalism resulted to the Spanish-American war. The yellow journalism was started by Joseph Pulitzer in 1896 with a carton of yellow kid and sold many paper. It was characterized with emotional words, dramatic sympathy, false information and misleading headlines which had huge print to attract the attention of people. I had a lot of drawing, pictures and images. Now William Hearst the owner of New York stole the writers from Pulitzer to complete the yellow journalism (Wilkerson, 1932). […]

Analysis of the Watchdog Role in Journalism

Chapter 10 of The Press explores the definition, key elements, and importance of Watchdog Journalism. Watchdog Journalism is a concept that has been and currently still is used in public journalism. It is an important foundation for bringing forth news to the public that may otherwise stay hidden. To begin, journalism has due-diligence to the public to report news that not only matters but affects them either emotionally or physically. Journalists implement the watchdog role in order to bring forth […]

News and Democracy in Different Media Systems

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The Yellow Kid and the Birth of Yellow Journalism

In 1895, the first comic strip was printed in an American newspaper. Called "Hogan's Alley, this popular cartoon made by Richard Outcault featured a buck-toothed, beady-eyed and big-eared boy wearing a yellow nightdress. Fittingly called The Yellow Kid, this loveable character began to gain popularity in an era full of consumerism, commercialization, urbanization and social reform. Newspapers in the late 1800s started to engage heavily in sensationalism and the reporting of exciting stories without full regard to objectivity and truth. […]

How Journalism has Affected our National Narrative

In this age of journalism there are numerous factors that play into the production and reliability of the information we receive. Taking into account a time where our country was less technologically advanced, "current news was primarily accessible to those who had seen it first hand or lived within a proximal distance. The evolution of technology has allowed a secondary source on one side of the world to present news and information to a consumer on another side of the […]

Rebecca Skloot: Unearthing Truths and Giving Voice to the Voiceless

When one thinks of the contemporary literary world, few authors resonate with the powerful interplay of science, ethics, and humanity quite like Rebecca Skloot. With a keen journalist's eye and an empathetic storyteller's heart, Skloot navigates intricate realms, shedding light on tales that might have otherwise remained in obscurity. Skloot's magnum opus, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," is a prime exemplification of her dedication to in-depth research and commitment to telling stories that matter. The narrative centers around Henrietta […]

The Future that Journalism Holds

Journalism continues to evolve at the same rate as the country's interpretations of the First Amendment. Because of the continual advances in technology around the world, society must question the state of journalism, and whether or not its older principles are still applicable to modern standards. As Stephen J.A. Ward highlights in his article Digital Media Ethics: "Most of the principles were developed over the past century, originating in the construction of professional, objective ethics for mass commercial newspapers in […]

The Jayson Blair Scandal: a Cautionary Tale in Journalism

Journalism, often deemed the "fourth estate," is expected to be a watchdog of society, upholding standards of truth, objectivity, and accountability. However, when its very foundations are shaken by controversies like the Jayson Blair scandal, it forces the world to re-examine the integrity of the news we consume and the institutions that deliver it. Jayson Blair, a young and promising journalist, made headlines in 2003, not for his exemplary reporting but for the elaborate web of deception he spun while […]

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Journalism in the Digital Age: the Rise of Online Newspapers in Nigeria

Nigeria has experienced a notable paradigm shift in the domain of journalism and media in recent times, primarily attributed to the proliferation of online newspapers. The transition from conventional print media to digital platforms has brought about a significant transformation in both the consumption and distribution of news. This essay delves into the progression of online newspapers in Nigeria, examining their ramifications on journalism, society, and politics, in addition to the obstacles and prospects they introduce. The proliferation of online […]

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The Yellow Journalism of the Internet Age

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In the tumultuous landscape of the early 20th century, a group of fearless journalists emerged as the catalysts for social and political change – the muckrakers. This term, coined by President Theodore Roosevelt, aptly captured the essence of these investigative writers who delved into the metaphorical muck and mire of society, exposing corruption, inequality, and injustice. During the Progressive Era, muckrakers wielded their pens as powerful tools for reform, bringing to light the dark corners of American life that were […]

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Situated amid the sun-drenched expanses of California's Central Valley, the Hanford Sentinel emerges as a distinctive emblem of local journalism's endurance and adaptability. In this sprawling tapestry of community newspapers, the Hanford Sentinel proudly stands as a linchpin, meticulously weaving the stories that echo through the lives of Hanford's inhabitants. Far removed from the digital cacophony, the Hanford Sentinel serves as a quiet custodian of community bonds, delving into the minutiae of local life. From quirky events and poignant narratives […]

Yellow Journalism: Sensational News from Yesteryear to your Feed

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Introductory essay

Written by the educators who created Covering World News, a brief look at the key facts, tough questions and big ideas in their field. Begin this TED Study with a fascinating read that gives context and clarity to the material.

At the newsstand, on our smartphones and while watching the evening news, we learn about faraway people and places from the journalists, stringers and correspondents who work for news agencies and other media outlets around the globe. Global news is everywhere — from the front page news read by a New Yorker on Madison Avenue to the government radio station broadcasting in Pyongyang.

However, it would be a mistake to consider this a completely new phenomenon or to overstate its pervasiveness. Many people tend to think that global news is both a recent phenomenon and one that we can credit to advances in technology. If we think of 'news' in terms of newspaper articles or television reporting, then news is only as old as the technologies of press and video, and dates back to the first newsletters that circulated in Europe in the 17th century.

But in reality, humans have shared information about current affairs within and across borders for thousands of years, starting with the news networks of the ancient Phoenicians. The historical record also describes merchants sharing political news along ancient trade routes, minstrels and other traveling artists whose fictional performances also carried information about social change, and criers in medieval town squares.

If news is not a product of modern technologies, it's nevertheless true that technological change has had a dramatic impact on how news is made and consumed: where once we had printed newsletters distributed twice a day, now we have Twitter feeds refreshed twice a minute, and carrying information from an ever-widening array of sources. We live, as media critics like Marshall McLuhan have argued, in a global village.

The trouble with this vision of 'global news' is that it's not nearly as complete as we imagine it to be. According to the World Bank, of the world's seven billion people, only 80% have access to electricity (or the gadgets like computer and televisions that depend on it), 75% have access to mobile phones, and a meager 35% to the Internet. Most people on the planet aren't connected to what we think of as the 'global media' at all. As Global Voices founder Ethan Zuckerman points out in his TED Talk, "There are parts of the world that are very, very well connected, [but] the world isn't even close to flat. It's extremely lumpy."

Just as critically, the content that makes up the 'global media' is still heavily focused on a few key centers of power. In her TED Talk, Public Radio International's Alisa Miller shares a powerful map of the news consumed by American audiences in 2008: most of it focused on the U.S., and to a lesser extent, on countries with which the U.S. has military ties. Ethan Zuckerman points out that this lack of global coverage is pervasive, whether it's at elite news outlets like The New York Times or on crowdsourced digital information platforms like Wikipedia.

Moreover, Zuckerman argues, it's not just about the stories that get made — it's about what stories we choose to listen to. Thirty years ago, Benedict Anderson made waves when he argued that political structures (like states) depend upon a set of shared values, the 'imagined community,' and that the media plays a key role in creating those values. Zuckerman, however, argues that in today's world the disconnect between what we imagine to be our community, and the community we actually live in, is a major source of global media inequality. We connect to the Internet, with its technological capacity to link up the whole world, and imagine that we live in a global village. But in practice, we spend most of our time reading news shared by our Facebook friends, whose lives and interests are close to our own. Zuckerman calls this 'imagined cosmopolitanism.'

Compounding the problem, the stories we do attend to can be heavily distorted, reducing whole countries or societies to a single stereotype or image. As author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains in her TED Talk about the 'single story,' when all the tales we hear about a country follow the same pattern, we begin to imagine that this pattern is all there is know. The 'single story' can affect all of us, rich and poor: Adichie talks of her own misconceptions about Nigeria's rural poor, of her surprise at encountering the diversity of life in Mexico, and of her college roommate's reductive vision of Africa as poor and underdeveloped. The difference, she argues, is that there are simply more stories out there about powerful countries than about less powerful ones, and that makes it harder for us to reduce those societies to 'single stories' in our minds.

What can we do?

First, we can tell different stories about the places that are prone to reduction. In her TED Talk, Yemeni newspaper editor Nadia Al-Sakkaf takes us to the Yemen she lives in — where terrorism and political upheaval are real problems, but far from the whole picture. Moreover, in her account, each image can tell many stories. A woman with a veiled face can represent the role of fundamentalist Islam in Yemeni society, but she argues that a look behind the veil shows us that many of these women are holding down jobs and earning income, and in so doing, changing their role within their own families and in Yemeni society more broadly.

Second, we can find ways to invest in journalism. As Alisa Miller argues, a major obstacle to a truly global news media is the cost of production, of keeping bureaus in every country and paying for journalists to produce deep, investigative stories. The great paradox of media economics in the digital age is that the Internet makes it possible for us to consume more content, but falling advertising revenues means that each piece of content must cost a little less to produce. That pushes news outlets, even wealthy ones, in the direction of gossip and regurgitated press releases that can be produced by a reporter who hasn't left her desk.

One way to break this cycle, Ethan Zuckerman argues, is to make small and targeted investments in local journalists in the developing world. He describes a blogger training program in Madagascar that became a newsroom overnight when world media outlets needed verified content from a country undergoing revolution. He highlights the critical work of professional curators like Amira Al Hussaini at Global Voices or Andy Carvin at the Associated Press.

At the heart of these recommendations is a shift in the way we understand the mission of journalists — or rather, a return to an old way of thinking about news.

Right up until the early 20th century, all journalists were assumed to be opinion writers. Reporters went places to report, made up their own minds about a topic, and wrote an account that included not only facts, but an argument for what position readers at home should take and what political actions might follow. George Orwell's colorful and opinionated essays from South East Asia, for example, were published as reportage.

Then the Cold War started, and in the democratic West, journalists began to strive for objective impartiality, to distinguish their work from the obvious, state-sponsored propaganda of the Soviet bloc. Many critics at the time questioned whether 'true' objectivity was possible, but no major western news organization disputed that it was the ideal.

Today, we're seeing a return to the older understanding of journalism, towards an acceptance that even independent reporting carries a viewpoint, shaped by the people who produce it. Moreover, contemporary journalists are increasingly coming to see this viewpoint as a strength rather than as a weakness, and using social media to be more transparent to readers about the values they bring to stories. New York University's Jay Rosen, for example, has argued powerfully that the 'view from nowhere' advocated by 20th century western reporters is dangerous because it can lead journalists to treat 'both sides' of a story equally even when one side is telling objective falsehoods or committing crimes.

Many of the speakers in Covering World News describe their journalism — whether it is Global Voices or the Yemen Times — as having an explicit moral and political mission to change our perceptions of under-covered regions of the world.

But no speaker is more passionate on this subject than TED speaker and photojournalist James Nachtwey, who credits the activist context of the 1960s for inspiring him to enter journalism, using photography to "channel anger" into a force for social change. Nachtwey's work has brought him, at times, into partnership with non-profit aid organizations, an alliance that is increasingly common in today's media world but would surely not have fit within the 'objective' media of a half-century ago. Nachtwey sees himself as a 'witness' whose place in the story is not to be invisible, but to channel his own humane outrage at war or social deprivation in order to drive social and political change: in one case, a story he produced prompted the creation of a non-profit organization to collect donations from readers.

This kind of work is a form of 'bridge building,' a theme that emerges in many of our talks. For while there may not be one 'global media' that includes all communities equally and reaches all parts of the globe, there are many individuals whose skills and backgrounds enable them to go between the connected and less connected pockets of the world, bridging gaps and contributing to mutual understanding. That, perhaps, is the way forward for international journalism.

Let's begin our study with Public Radio International CEO Alisa Miller, an ardent advocate for a global perspective in news programming. In her TEDTalk "The news about the news," Miller shares some eye-opening statistics about the quantity and quality of recent foreign reporting by American mainstream media organizations.

Alisa Miller

How the news distorts our worldview, relevant talks.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The danger of a single story.

James Nachtwey

My wish: let my photographs bear witness.

Nadia Al-Sakkaf

See yemen through my eyes.

Ethan Zuckerman

Listening to global voices.

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Does Journalism Have a Future?

By Jill Lepore

The wood-panelled tailgate of the 1972 Oldsmobile station wagon dangled open like a broken jaw, making a wobbly bench on which four kids could sit, eight legs swinging. Every Sunday morning, long before dawn, we’d get yanked out of bed to stuff the car’s way-back with stacks of twine-tied newspapers, clamber onto the tailgate, cut the twine with my mother’s sewing scissors, and ride around town, bouncing along on that bench, while my father shouted out orders from the driver’s seat. “Watch out for the dog!” he’d holler between draws on his pipe. “Inside the screen door!” “Mailbox!” As the car crept along, never stopping, we’d each grab a paper and dash in the dark across icy driveways or dew-drunk grass, crashing, seasonally, into unexpected snowmen. “Back porch!” “Money under the mat!” He kept a list, scrawled on the back of an envelope, taped to the dashboard: the Accounts. “They owe three weeks!” He didn’t need to remind us. We knew each Doberman and every debt. We’d deliver our papers—Worcester Sunday Telegrams —and then run back to the car and scramble onto the tailgate, dropping the coins we’d collected into empty Briggs tobacco tins as we bumped along to the next turn, the newspaper route our Sabbath.

The Worcester Sunday Telegram was founded in 1884, when a telegram meant something fast. Two years later, it became a daily. It was never a great paper but it was always a pretty good paper: useful, gossipy, and resolute. It cultivated talent. The poet Stanley Kunitz was a staff writer for the Telegram in the nineteen-twenties. The New York Times reporter Douglas Kneeland, who covered Kent State and Charles Manson, began his career there in the nineteen-fifties. Joe McGinniss reported for the Telegram in the nineteen-sixties before writing “The Selling of the President.” From bushy-bearded nineteenth-century politicians to baby-faced George W. Bush, the paper was steadfastly Republican, if mainly concerned with scandals and mustachioed villains close to home: overdue repairs to the main branch of the public library, police raids on illegal betting establishments—“ Worcester Dog Chases Worcester Cat Over Worcester Fence ,” as the old Washington press-corps joke about a typical headline in a local paper goes. Its pages rolled off giant, thrumming presses in a four-story building that overlooked City Hall the way every city paper used to look out over every city hall, the Bat-Signal over Gotham.

Most newspapers like that haven’t lasted. Between 1970 and 2016, the year the American Society of News Editors quit counting, five hundred or so dailies went out of business; the rest cut news coverage, or shrank the paper’s size, or stopped producing a print edition, or did all of that, and it still wasn’t enough. The newspaper mortality rate is old news, and nostalgia for dead papers is itself pitiful at this point, even though, I still say, there’s a principle involved. “I wouldn’t weep about a shoe factory or a branch-line railroad shutting down,” Heywood Broun, the founder of the American Newspaper Guild, said when the New York World went out of business, in 1931. “But newspapers are different.” And the bleeding hasn’t stopped. Between January, 2017, and April, 2018, a third of the nation’s largest newspapers, including the Denver Post and the San Jose Mercury News , reported layoffs. In a newer trend, so did about a quarter of digital-native news sites. BuzzFeed News laid off a hundred people in 2017; speculation is that BuzzFeed is trying to dump it. The Huffington Post paid most of its writers nothing for years, upping that recently to just above nothing, and yet, despite taking in tens of millions of dollars in advertising revenue in 2018, it failed to turn a profit.

Even veterans of august and still thriving papers are worried, especially about the fake news that’s risen from the ashes of the dead news. “We are, for the first time in modern history, facing the prospect of how societies would exist without reliable news,” Alan Rusbridger, for twenty years the editor-in-chief of the Guardian , writes in “ Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now .” “There are not that many places left that do quality news well or even aim to do it at all,” Jill Abramson , a former executive editor of the New York Times , writes in “Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts.” Like most big-paper reporters and editors who write about the crisis of journalism, Rusbridger and Abramson are interested in national and international news organizations. The local story is worse.

First came conglomeration. Worcester, Massachusetts, the second-largest city in New England, used to have four dailies: the Telegram , in the morning, and the Gazette , in the evening (under the same ownership), the Spy , and the Post . Now it has one. The last great laying waste to American newspapers came in the early decades of the twentieth century, mainly owing to (a) radio and (b) the Depression; the number of dailies fell from 2,042 in 1920 to 1,754 in 1944, leaving 1,103 cities with only one paper. Newspaper circulation rose between 1940 and 1990, but likely only because more people were reading fewer papers, and, as A. J. Liebling once observed, nothing is crummier than a one-paper town. In 1949, after yet another New York daily closed its doors, Liebling predicted, “If the trend continues, New York will be a one- or two-paper town by about 1975.” He wasn’t that far off. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, as Christopher B. Daly reports in “ Covering America: A Narrative History of the Nation’s Journalism ,” “the big kept getting bigger.” Conglomeration can be good for business, but it has generally been bad for journalism. Media companies that want to get bigger tend to swallow up other media companies, suppressing competition and taking on debt, which makes publishers cowards. In 1986, the publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle bought the Worcester Telegram and the Evening Gazette , and, three years later, right about when Time and Warner became Time Warner, the Telegram and the Gazette became the Telegram & Gazette , or the T&G , smaller fries but the same potato.

Next came the dot-coms. Craigslist went online in the Bay Area in 1996 and spread across the continent like a weed, choking off local newspapers’ most reliable source of revenue: classified ads. The T&G tried to hold on to its classified-advertising section by wading into the shallow waters of the Internet, at telegram.com, where it was called, acronymically, and not a little desperately, “ TANGO !” Then began yet another round of corporate buyouts, deeply leveraged deals conducted by executives answerable to stockholders seeking higher dividends, not better papers. In 1999, the New York Times Company bought the T&G for nearly three hundred million dollars. By 2000, only three hundred and fifty of the fifteen hundred daily newspapers left in the United States were independently owned. And only one out of every hundred American cities that had a daily newspaper was anything other than a one-paper town.

Then came the fall, when papers all over the country, shackled to mammoth corporations and a lumbering, century-old business model, found themselves unable to compete with the upstarts—online news aggregators like the Huffington Post (est. 2005) and Breitbart News (est. 2007), which were, to readers, free. News aggregators also drew display advertisers away from print; Facebook and Google swallowed advertising accounts whole. Big papers found ways to adapt; smaller papers mainly folded. Between 1994 and 2016, years when the population of Worcester County rose by more than a hundred thousand, daily home delivery of the T&G declined from more than a hundred and twenty thousand to barely thirty thousand. In one year alone, circulation fell by twenty-nine per cent. In 2012, after another round of layoffs, the T&G left its building, its much reduced staff small enough to fit into two floors of an office building nearby. The next year, the owner of the Boston Red Sox bought the newspaper, along with the Boston Globe , from the New York Times Company for seventy million dollars, only to unload the T&G less than a year later, for seventeen million dollars, to Halifax Media Group, which held it for only half a year before Halifax itself was bought, flea-market style, by an entity that calls itself, unironically, the New Media Investment Group.

The numbers mask an uglier story. In the past half century, and especially in the past two decades, journalism itself—the way news is covered, reported, written, and edited—has changed, including in ways that have made possible the rise of fake news, and not only because of mergers and acquisitions, and corporate ownership, and job losses, and Google Search, and Facebook and BuzzFeed . There’s no shortage of amazing journalists at work, clear-eyed and courageous, broad-minded and brilliant, and no end of fascinating innovation in matters of form, especially in visual storytelling. Still, journalism, as a field, is as addled as an addict, gaunt, wasted, and twitchy, its pockets as empty as its nights are sleepless. It’s faster than it used to be, so fast. It’s also edgier, and needier, and angrier. It wants and it wants and it wants. But what does it need?

The daily newspaper is the taproot of modern journalism. Dailies mainly date to the eighteen-thirties, the decade in which the word “journalism” was coined, meaning daily reporting, the jour in journalism. Early dailies depended on subscribers to pay the bills. The press was partisan, readers were voters, and the news was meant to persuade (and voter turnout was high). But by 1900 advertising made up more than two-thirds of the revenue at most of the nation’s eighteen thousand newspapers, and readers were consumers (and voter turnout began its long fall). “The newspaper is not a missionary or a charitable institution, but a business that collects and publishes news which the people want and are willing to buy,” one Missouri editor said in 1892. Newspapers stopped rousing the rabble so much because businesses wanted readers, no matter their politics. “There is a sentiment gaining ground to the effect that the public wants its politics ‘straight,’ ” a journalist wrote the following year. Reporters pledged themselves to “facts, facts, and more facts,” and, as the press got less partisan and more ad-based, newspapers sorted themselves out not by their readers’ political leanings but by their incomes. If you had a lot of money to spend, you read the St. Paul Pioneer Press; if you didn’t have very much, you read the St. Paul Dispatch .

Unsurprisingly, critics soon began writing big books, usually indictments, about the relationship between business and journalism. “When you read your daily paper, are you reading facts or propaganda?” Upton Sinclair asked on the jacket of “ The Brass Check ,” in 1919. In “ The Disappearing Daily ,” in 1944, Oswald Garrison Villard mourned “what was once a profession but is now a business.” The big book that inspired Jill Abramson to become a journalist was David Halberstam’s “ The Powers That Be ,” from 1979, a history of the rise of the modern, corporate-based media in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his reporting from Vietnam for the New York Times , took up his story more or less where Villard left off. He began with F.D.R. and CBS radio; added the Los Angeles Times , Time Inc., and CBS television; and reached his story’s climax with the Washington Post and the New York Times and the publication of the Pentagon Papers, in 1971.

Halberstam argued that between the nineteen-thirties and the nineteen-seventies radio and television brought a new immediacy to reporting, while the resources provided by corporate owners and the demands made by an increasingly sophisticated national audience led to harder-hitting, investigative, adversarial reporting, the kind that could end a war and bring down a President. Richard Rovere summed it up best: “What The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Time and CBS have in common is that, under pressures generated internally and externally, they moved from venality or parochialism or mediocrity or all three to something approaching journalistic excellence and responsibility.” That move came at a price. “Watergate, like Vietnam, had obscured one of the central new facts about the role of journalism in America,” Halberstam wrote. “Only very rich, very powerful corporate institutions like these had the impact, the reach, and above all the resources to challenge the President of the United States.”

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There’s reach, and then there’s reach. When I was growing up, in the nineteen-seventies, nobody I knew read the New York Times , the Washington Post , or the Wall Street Journal . Nobody I knew even read the Boston Globe , a paper that used to have a rule that no piece should ever be so critical of anyone that its “writer could not shake hands the next day with the man about whom he had written.” After journalism put up its dukes, my father only ever referred to the Globe as “that Communist rag,” not least because, in 1967, it became the first major paper in the United States to come out against the Vietnam War.

The view of the new journalism held by people like my father escaped Halberstam’s notice. In 1969, Nixon’s Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, delivered a speech drafted by the Nixon aide Pat Buchanan accusing the press of liberal bias. It’s “good politics for us to kick the press around,” Nixon is said to have told his staff. The press, Agnew said, represents “a concentration of power over American public opinion unknown in history,” consisting of men who “read the same newspapers” and “talk constantly to one another.” How dare they. Halberstam waved this aside as so much P.R. hooey, but, as has since become clear, Agnew reached a ready audience, especially in houses like mine.

Spiro who? “The press regarded Agnew with uncontrolled hilarity,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., observed in 1970, but “no one can question the force of Spiro T. Agnew’s personality, nor the impact of his speeches.” No scholar of journalism can afford to ignore Agnew anymore. In “ On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News ,” the historian Matthew Pressman argues that any understanding of the crisis of journalism in the twenty-first century has to begin by vanquishing the ghost of Spiro T. Agnew.

For Pressman, the pivotal period for the modern newsroom is what Abramson calls “Halberstam’s Golden Age,” between 1960 and 1980, and its signal feature was the adoption not of a liberal bias but of liberal values: “Interpretation replaced transmission, and adversarialism replaced deference.” In 1960, nine out of every ten articles in the Times about the Presidential election were descriptive; by 1976, more than half were interpretative. This turn was partly a consequence of television—people who simply wanted to find out what happened could watch television, so newspapers had to offer something else—and partly a consequence of McCarthyism . “The rise of McCarthy has compelled newspapers of integrity to develop a form of reporting which puts into context what men like McCarthy have to say,” the radio commentator Elmer Davis said in 1953. Five years later, the Times added “News Analysis” as a story category. “Once upon a time, news stories were like tape recorders,” the Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors commented in 1963. “No more. A whole generation of events had taught us better—Hitler and Goebbels, Stalin and McCarthy, automation and analog computers and missiles.”

These changes weren’t ideologically driven, Pressman insists, but they had ideological consequences. At the start, leading conservatives approved. “To keep a reporter’s prejudices out of a story is commendable,” Irving Kristol wrote in 1967. “To keep his judgment out of a story is to guarantee that the truth will be emasculated.” After the Times and the Post published the Pentagon Papers, Kristol changed his spots. Journalists, he complained in 1972, were now “engaged in a perpetual confrontation with the social and political order (the ‘establishment,’ as they say).” By 1975, after Watergate, Kristol was insisting that “most journalists today . . . are ‘liberals.’ ” With that, the conservative attack on the press was off and running, all the way to Trumpism—“the failing New York Times,” “CNN is fake news,” the press is “the true enemy of the people”—and, in a revolution-devouring-its-elders sort of way, the shutting down of William Kristol’s Weekly Standard , in December. “The pathetic and dishonest Weekly Standard . . . is flat broke and out of business,” Trump tweeted. “May it rest in peace!”

What McCarthy and television were for journalism in the nineteen-fifties, Trump and social media would be in the twenty-tens: license to change the rules. Halberstam’s Golden Age, or what he called “journalism’s high-water mark,” ended about 1980. Abramson’s analysis in “Merchants of Truth” begins with journalism’s low-water mark, in 2007, the year after Facebook launched its News Feed, “the year everything began to fall apart.”

“ Merchants of Truth ” isn’t just inspired by “The Powers That Be”; it’s modelled on it. Abramson’s book follows Halberstam’s structure and mimics its style, chronicling the history of a handful of nationally prominent media organizations—in her case, BuzzFeed, Vice, the Times , and the Washington Post —in alternating chapters that are driven by character sketches and reported scenes. The book is saturated with a lot of gossip and glitz, including details about the restaurants the powers that be frequent, and what they wear (“Sulzberger”—the Times ’ publisher—“dressed in suits from Bloomingdale’s, stylish without being ostentatiously bespoke, and wore suspenders before they went out of fashion”), alongside crucial insights about structural transformations, like how Web and social-media publishing “unbundled” the newspaper, so that readers who used to find a fat newspaper on their front porch could, on their phones, look, instead, at only one story. “Each individual article now lived on its own page, where it had a unique URL and could be shared, and spread virally,” Abramson observes. “This put stories, rather than papers, in competition with one another.”

This history is a chronicle of missed opportunities, missteps, and lessons learned the hard way. As long ago as 1992, an internal report at the Washington Post urged the mounting of an “electronic product”: “The Post ought to be in the forefront of this.” Early on, the Guardian started a New Media lab, which struck a lot of people as frivolous, Rusbridger writes, because, at the time, “only 3 per cent of households owned a PC and a modem,” a situation not unlike that at the Guardian’s own offices, where “it was rumored that downstairs a bloke called Paul in IT had a Mac connected to the internet.” A 1996 business plan for the Guardian concluded that the priority was print, and the London Times editor Simon Jenkins predicted, “The Internet will strut an hour upon the stage, and then take its place in the ranks of the lesser media.” In 2005, the Post lost a chance at a ten-per-cent investment in Facebook, whose returns, as Abramson points out, would have floated the newspaper for decades. The C.E.O. of the Washington Post Company, Don Graham, and Mark Zuckerberg shook hands over the deal, making a verbal contract, but, when Zuckerberg weaseled out of it to take a better offer, Graham, out of kindness to a young fella just starting out, simply let him walk away. The next year, the Post shrugged off a proposal from two of its star political reporters to start a spinoff Web site; they went on to found Politico. The Times , Abramson writes, declined an early chance to invest in Google, and was left to throw the kitchen sink at its failing business model, including adding a Thursday Style section to attract more high-end advertising revenue. Bill Keller, then the newspaper’s editor, said, “If luxury porn is what saves the Baghdad bureau, so be it.”

More alarming than what the Times and the Post failed to do was how so much of what they did do was determined less by their own editors than by executives at Facebook and BuzzFeed. If journalism has been reinvented during the past two decades, it has, in the main, been reinvented not by reporters and editors but by tech companies, in a sequence of events that, in Abramson’s harrowing telling, resemble a series of puerile stunts more than acts of public service.

Who even are these people? “Merchants of Truth” has been charged with factual errors, including by people Abramson interviewed, especially younger journalists. She can also be maddeningly condescending. She doffs her cap at Sulzberger, with his natty suspenders, but dismisses younger reporters at places like Vice as notable mainly for being “impossibly hip, with interesting hair.” This is distracting, and too bad, because there is a changing of the guard worth noting, and it’s not incidental: it’s critical. All the way through to the nineteen-eighties, all sorts of journalists, including magazine, radio, and television reporters, got their start working on daily papers, learning the ropes and the rules. Rusbridger started out in 1976 as a reporter at the Cambridge Evening News , which covered stories that included a petition about a pedestrian crossing and a root vegetable that looked like Winston Churchill. In the U.K., a reporter who wanted to go to Fleet Street had first to work for three years on a provincial newspaper, pounding the pavement. Much the same applied in the U.S., where a cub reporter did time at the Des Moines Register , or the Worcester Telegram , before moving up to the New York Times or the Herald Tribune. Beat reporting, however, is not the backstory of the people who, beginning in the nineteen-nineties, built the New Media.

Jonah Peretti started out soaking up postmodern theory at U.C. Santa Cruz in the mid-nineteen-nineties, and later published a scholarly journal article about the scrambled, disjointed, and incoherent way of thinking produced by accelerated visual experiences under late capitalism. Or something like that. Imagine an article written by that American Studies professor in Don DeLillo’s “ White Noise .” Peretti thought that watching a lot of MTV can mess with your head—“The rapid fire succession of signifiers in MTV style media erodes the viewer’s sense of temporal continuity”—leaving you confused, stupid, and lonely. “Capitalism needs schizophrenia, but it also needs egos,” Peretti wrote. “The contradiction is resolved through the acceleration of the temporal rhythm of late capitalist visual culture. This type of acceleration encourages weak egos that are easily formed, and fade away just as easily.” Voilà, a business plan!

Peretti’s career in viral content began in 2001, with a prank involving e-mail and Nike sneakers while he was a graduate student at the M.I.T. Media Lab. (Peretti ordered custom sneakers embroidered with the word “sweatshop” and then circulated Nike’s reply.) In 2005, a year the New York Times Company laid off five hundred employees and the Post began paying people to retire early, Peretti joined Andrew Breitbart, a Matt Drudge acolyte, and Ken Lerer, a former P.R. guy at AOL Time Warner, in helping Arianna Huffington, a millionaire and a former anti-feminist polemicist, launch the Huffington Post. Peretti was in charge of innovations that included a click-o-meter. Within a couple of years, the Huffington Post had more Web traffic than the Los Angeles Times , the Washington Post , and the Wall Street Journal . Its business was banditry. Abramson writes that when the Times published a deeply reported exclusive story about WikiLeaks, which took months of investigative work and a great deal of money, the Huffington Post published its own version of the story, using the same headline—and beat out the Times story in Google rankings. “We were learning that the internet behaved like a clattering of jackdaws,” Rusbridger writes. “Nothing remained exclusive for more than two minutes.”

Pretty soon, there were jackdaws all over the place, with their schizophrenic late-capitalist accelerated signifiers. Breitbart left the Huffington Post and started Breitbart News around the same time that Peretti left to focus on his own company, Contagious Media, from which he launched BuzzFeed, where he tested the limits of virality with offerings like the seven best links about gay penguins and “YouTube Porn Hacks.” He explained his methods in a pitch to venture capitalists: “Raw buzz is automatically published the moment it is detected by our algorithm,” and “the future of the industry is advertising as content.”

Facebook launched its News Feed in 2006. In 2008, Peretti mused on Facebook, “Thinking about the economics of the news business.” The company added its Like button in 2009. Peretti set likability as BuzzFeed’s goal, and, to perfect the instruments for measuring it, he enlisted partners, including the Times and the Guardian , to share their data with him in exchange for his reports on their metrics. Lists were liked. Hating people was liked. And it turned out that news, which is full of people who hate other people, can be crammed into lists.

Chartbeat, a “content intelligence” company founded in 2009, launched a feature called Newsbeat in 2011. Chartbeat offers real-time Web analytics, displaying a constantly updated report on Web traffic that tells editors what stories people are reading and what stories they’re skipping. The Post winnowed out reporters based on their Chartbeat numbers. At the offices of Gawker, the Chartbeat dashboard was displayed on a giant screen.

In 2011, Peretti launched BuzzFeed News, hiring a thirty-five-year-old Politico journalist, Ben Smith, as its editor-in-chief. Smith asked for a “scoop-a-day” from his reporters, who, he told Abramson, had little interest in the rules of journalism: “They didn’t even know what rules they were breaking.” In 2012, BuzzFeed introduced three new one-click ways for readers to respond to stories, beyond “liking” them—LOL, OMG, and WTF—and ran lists like “10 Reasons Everyone Should Be Furious About Trayvon Martin’s Murder,” in which, as Abramson explains, BuzzFeed “simply lifted what it needed from reports published elsewhere, repackaged the information, and presented it in a way that emphasized sentiment and celebrity.” BuzzFeed makes a distinction between BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News, just as newspapers and magazines draw distinctions between their print and their digital editions. These distinctions are lost on most readers. BuzzFeed News covered the Trayvon Martin story, but its information, like BuzzFeed’s, came from Reuters and the Associated Press.

Even as news organizations were pruning reporters and editors, Facebook was pruning its users’ news, with the commercially appealing but ethically indefensible idea that people should see only the news they want to see. In 2013, Silicon Valley began reading its own online newspaper, the Information, its high-priced subscription peddled to the information élite, following the motto “Quality stories breed quality subscribers.” Facebook’s goal, Zuckerberg explained in 2014, was to “build the perfect personalized newspaper for every person in the world.” Ripples at Facebook create tsunamis in newsrooms. The ambitious news site Mic relied on Facebook to reach an audience through a video program called Mic Dispatch, on Facebook Watch; last fall, after Facebook suggested that it would drop the program, Mic collapsed. Every time Facebook News tweaks its algorithm—tweaks made for commercial, not editorial, reasons—news organizations drown in the undertow. An automated Facebook feature called Trending Topics, introduced in 2014, turned out to mainly identify junk as trends, and so “news curators,” who tended to be recent college graduates, were given a new, manual mandate, “massage the algorithm,” which meant deciding, themselves, which stories mattered. The fake news that roiled the 2016 election? A lot of that was stuff on Trending Topics. (Last year, Facebook discontinued the feature.)

BuzzFeed surpassed the Times Web site in reader traffic in 2013. BuzzFeed News is subsidized by BuzzFeed, which, like many Web sites—including, at this point, those of most major news organizations—makes money by way of “native advertising,” ads that look like articles. In some publications, these fake stories are easy to spot; in others, they’re not. At BuzzFeed, they’re in the same font as every other story. BuzzFeed’s native-advertising bounty meant that BuzzFeed News had money to pay reporters and editors, and it began producing some very good and very serious reporting, real news having become something of a luxury good. By 2014, BuzzFeed employed a hundred and fifty journalists, including many foreign correspondents. It was obsessed with Donald Trump’s rumored Presidential bid, and followed him on what it called the “fake campaign trail” as early as January, 2014. “It used to be the New York Times , now it’s BuzzFeed,” Trump said, wistfully. “The world has changed.” At the time, Steve Bannon was stumping for Trump on Breitbart. Left or right, a Trump Presidency was just the sort of story that could rack up the LOLs, OMGs, and WTFs. It still is.

In March, 2014, the Times produced an Innovation Report, announcing that the newspaper had fallen behind in “the art and science of getting our journalism to readers,” a field led by BuzzFeed. That May, Sulzberger fired Abramson, who had been less than all-in about the Times doing things like running native ads. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed purged from its Web site more than four thousand of its early stories. “It’s stuff made at a time when people were really not thinking of themselves as doing journalism,” Ben Smith explained. Not long afterward, the Times began running more lists, from book recommendations to fitness tips to takeaways from Presidential debates.

The Times remains unrivalled. It staffs bureaus all over the globe and sends reporters to some of the world’s most dangerous places. It has more than a dozen reporters in China alone. Nevertheless, BuzzFeed News became more like the Times , and the Times became more like BuzzFeed, because readers, as Chartbeat announced on its endlessly flickering dashboards, wanted lists, and luxury porn, and people to hate.

The Guardian , founded as the Manchester Guardian in 1821, has been held by a philanthropic trust since 1936, which somewhat insulates it from market forces, just as Jeff Bezos’s ownership now does something similar for the Post . By investing in digital-readership research from the time Rusbridger took charge, in 1995, the Guardian became, for a while, the online market leader in the U.K. By 2006, two-thirds of its digital readers were outside the U.K. In 2007, the Guardian undertook what Rusbridger calls “the Great Integration,” pulling its Web and print parts together into a single news organization, with the same editorial management. It also developed a theory about the relationship between print and digital, deciding, in 2011, to be a “digital-first organization” and to “make print a slower, more reflective read which would not aspire to cover the entire waterfront in news.”

Rusbridger explains, with a palpable grief, his dawning realization that the rise of social media meant that “chaotic information was free: good information was expensive,” which meant, in turn, that “good information was increasingly for smaller elites” and that “it was harder for good information to compete on equal terms with bad.” He takes these circumstances as something of a dare: “Our generation had been handed the challenge of rethinking almost everything societies had, for centuries, taken for granted about journalism.”

Has that challenge been met? The Guardian’s own success is mixed. As of 2018, it was in the black, partly by relying on philanthropy, especially in the U.S. “Reader revenue,” in the form of donations marked not as subscriptions but as voluntary “memberships,” is expected to overtake advertising revenue before long. Raising money from people who care about journalism has allowed the Guardian to keep the Web site free. It’s also broken some big stories, from the Murdoch-papers phone-hacking scoop to the saga of Edward Snowden, and provided riveting coverage of ongoing and urgent stories, especially climate change. But, for all its fine reporting and substantive “Long Reads,” the paper consists disproportionately of ideologically unvarying opinion essays. By some measures, journalism entered a new, Trumpian, gold-plated age during the 2016 campaign, with the Trump bump, when news organizations found that the more they featured Trump the better their Chartbeat numbers, which, arguably, is a lot of what got him elected. The bump swelled into a lump and, later, a malignant tumor, a carcinoma the size of Cleveland. Within three weeks of the election, the Times added a hundred and thirty-two thousand new subscribers. (This effect hasn’t extended to local papers.) News organizations all over the world now advertise their services as the remedy to Trumpism, and to fake news; fighting Voldemort and his Dark Arts is a good way to rake in readers. And scrutiny of the Administration has produced excellent work, the very best of journalism. “ How President Trump Is Saving Journalism ,” a 2017 post on Forbes.com, marked Trump as the Nixon to today’s rising generation of Woodwards and Bernsteins. Superb investigative reporting is published every day, by news organizations both old and new, including BuzzFeed News.

By the what-doesn’t-kill-you line of argument, the more forcefully Trump attacks the press, the stronger the press becomes. Unfortunately, that’s not the full story. All kinds of editorial decisions are now outsourced to Facebook’s News Feed, Chartbeat, or other forms of editorial automation, while the hands of many flesh-and-blood editors are tied to so many algorithms. For one reason and another, including twenty-first-century journalism’s breakneck pace, stories now routinely appear that might not have been published a generation ago, prompting contention within the reportorial ranks. In 2016, when BuzzFeed News released the Steele dossier, many journalists disapproved, including CNN’s Jake Tapper, who got his start as a reporter for the Washington City Paper . “It is irresponsible to put uncorroborated information on the Internet,” Tapper said. “It’s why we did not publish it, and why we did not detail any specifics from it, because it was uncorroborated, and that’s not what we do.” The Times veered from its normal practices when it published an anonymous opinion essay by a senior official in the Trump Administration. And The New Yorker posted a story online about Brett Kavanaugh’s behavior when he was an undergraduate at Yale, which Republicans in the Senate pointed to as evidence of a liberal conspiracy against the nominee.

There’s plenty of room to argue over these matters of editorial judgment. Reasonable people disagree. Occasionally, those disagreements fall along a generational divide. Younger journalists often chafe against editorial restraint, not least because their cohort is far more likely than senior newsroom staff to include people from groups that have been explicitly and viciously targeted by Trump and the policies of his Administration, a long and growing list that includes people of color, women, immigrants, Muslims, members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and anyone with family in Haiti or any of the other countries Trump deems “shitholes.” Sometimes younger people are courageous and sometimes they are heedless and sometimes those two things are the same. “The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures,” Abramson writes, and that “the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards.” Still, by no means is the divide always or even usually generational. Abramson, for instance, sided with BuzzFeed News about the Steele dossier, just as she approves of the use of the word “lie” to refer to Trump’s lies, which, by the Post’s reckoning, came at the rate of more than a dozen a day in 2018.

The broader problem is that the depravity, mendacity, vulgarity, and menace of the Trump Administration have put a lot of people, including reporters and editors, off their stride. The present crisis, which is nothing less than a derangement of American life, has caused many people in journalism to make decisions they regret, or might yet. In the age of Facebook, Chartbeat, and Trump, legacy news organizations, hardly less than startups, have violated or changed their editorial standards in ways that have contributed to political chaos and epistemological mayhem. Do editors sit in a room on Monday morning, twirl the globe, and decide what stories are most important? Or do they watch Trump’s Twitter feed and let him decide? It often feels like the latter. Sometimes what doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you stronger; it makes everyone sick. The more adversarial the press, the more loyal Trump’s followers, the more broken American public life. The more desperately the press chases readers, the more our press resembles our politics.

The problems are well understood, the solutions harder to see. Good reporting is expensive, but readers don’t want to pay for it. The donation-funded ProPublica, “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force,” employs more than seventy-five journalists. Good reporting is slow, good stories unfold, and most stories that need telling don’t involve the White House. The Correspondent, an English-language version of the Dutch Web site De Correspondent, is trying to “unbreak the news.” It won’t run ads. It won’t collect data (or, at least, not much). It won’t have subscribers. Like NPR, it will be free for everyone, supported by members, who pay what they can. “We want to radically change what news is about, how it is made, and how it is funded,” its founders state. Push-notifications-on news is bad for you, they say, “because it pays more attention to the sensational, exceptional, negative, recent, and incidental, thereby losing sight of the ordinary, usual, positive, historical, and systematic.” What will the Correspondent look like? It will stay above the fray. It might sometimes be funny. It’s slated to début sometime in 2019. Aside from the thing about ads, it sounds a lot like a magazine, when magazines came in the mail.

After we’d shoved the last, fat Worcester Sunday Telegram inside the last, unlatched screen door, we’d head home, my father taking turns a little too fast, so that we’d have to clutch at one another and at the lip of the tailgate, to keep from falling off. “Dad, slow down!” we’d squeal, not meaning it. Then he’d make breakfast, hot chocolate with marshmallows in the winter, orange juice from a can of frozen concentrate in the summer, and on my plate I’d make wedges of cantaloupe into Viking ships sailing across a sea of maple syrup from the Coast of Bacon to Pancake Island. After breakfast, we’d dump the money from the tobacco tins onto the kitchen table and count coins, stacking quarters and nickels and dimes into wrappers from the Worcester County Institution for Savings, while my father updated the Accounts, and made the Collection List.

Going collecting was a drag. You had to knock on people’s doors and ask your neighbors for money—“ Telegram! Collecting!”—and it was embarrassing, and, half the time, they’d ask you in, and before you knew it you’d be helping out, and it would take all day. “So long as you’re here, could you hold the baby while I take a quick shower?” “Honey, after this, could you bring my mail down to the post office on that cute little bike of yours?” I came to understand that the people who didn’t leave the money under the mat hadn’t forgotten to. They just liked having a kid visit on Sunday afternoon.

The death of a newspaper is sometimes like other deaths. The Mrs. and the Miss, a very, very old woman and her very old daughter, lived in a crooked green house on top of a rise and wore matching housecoats and slippers. The Miss followed the Mrs. around like a puppy, and, if you found them in the parlor reading the paper, the Mrs. would be poring over the opinion pages while the Miss cut pictures out of the funnies. “The Miss can’t think straight,” my father said. “Her head’s scrambled. So be gentle with her. Nothing to be afraid of. Be sure to help them out.” Once when I biked over there, the Miss was standing, keening, noise without words, sound without sense. The Mrs. wasn’t moving, and she wasn’t ever going to move again. I called for help and held the Miss’s hand, waiting for the wail of sirens. I didn’t know what else to do. ♦

An earlier version of this story misstated the subtitle of Christopher B. Daly’s book “Covering America.” It also misstated the Huffington Post’s advertising revenue.

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By Ken Auletta

By Nicholas Lemann

By Manvir Singh

Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Literary Journalism

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Literary journalism is another essay form that is best reserved for intermediate and advanced level courses, but it can be incorporated into introductory and composition courses. Literary journalism is the creative nonfiction form that comes closest to newspaper and magazine writing. It is fact-driven and requires research and, often, interviews.

Literary journalism is sometimes called “immersion journalism” because it requires a closer, more active relationship to the subject and to the people the literary journalist is exploring. Like journalistic writing, the literary journalism piece should be well-researched, focus on a brief period of time, and concentrate on what is happening outside of the writer’s small circle of personal experience and feelings.

An Example and Discussion of a Literary Journalism

The following excerpt from George Orwell is a good example of literary journalism. Orwell wrote about the colonial regime in Marrakech. His father was a colonial officer, so Orwell was confronted with the reality of empire from an early age, and that experience is reflected in his literary journalism piece, Marrakech :

Orwell isn’t writing a reflective, personal essay about his travels through Marrakech. Neither is he writing a memoir about what it was like to be the son of a colonial officer, nor how that experience shaped his adult life. He writes in a descriptive way about the Jewish quarters in Marrakech, about the invisibility of the “natives,” and about the way citizenship doesn’t ensure equality under a colonial regime.

Generating Ideas for Literary Journalism

One way to incorporate literary journalism into an introductory or intermediate level course is simply to have students write personal essays first. Then the students can go back and research the facts behind the personal experiences related in their essays. They can incorporate historical data, interviews, or broaden the range of their personal essay by exploring the cultural or political issues hinted at in their personal essays.

If a student writes, in passing, about the first presidential candidate they were eligible to vote for, then they can include facts and figures around that particular election, as well as research other events that were current at that time, for example. As with other essay forms, students should find topics that are important to them.

Essay on Journalism

Students are often asked to write an essay on Journalism in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Journalism

Understanding journalism.

Journalism is the activity of gathering, assessing, creating, and presenting news and information. It’s a way to keep people informed about the world around them.

Types of Journalism

There are different types of journalism, like investigative, news, reviews, and feature stories. Each type has its own purpose and style.

Role of Journalists

Journalists play an important role in society. They help people understand complex issues, hold powerful people accountable, and share inspiring stories.

Challenges in Journalism

Journalism faces challenges like fake news and bias. It’s important for journalists to be fair, accurate, and truthful in their reporting.

250 Words Essay on Journalism

Introduction.

Journalism, a cornerstone of democratic societies, plays a pivotal role in shaping public opinion and fostering transparency. It acts as a conduit for information, providing the public with the necessary knowledge to make informed decisions.

The Pillars of Journalism

The pillars of journalism, truth and accuracy, independence, fairness and impartiality, humanity, and accountability, form the bedrock of this profession. Journalists strive to report the truth, corroborating their facts from multiple sources to ensure accuracy. Independence from influence, whether political or commercial, allows journalists to maintain impartiality and fairness in their reporting.

Journalism encompasses several types, including investigative, news, reviews, and feature writing. Investigative journalism delves into issues of public interest, often uncovering scandals or corruption. News journalism, the most common type, reports daily happenings. Reviews and feature writing offer in-depth analyses of topics, ranging from books and movies to societal trends.

The Impact of Digitalization

The advent of digitalization has revolutionized journalism. It has facilitated real-time reporting and expanded the reach of journalists, transcending geographical limitations. However, it has also given rise to challenges such as fake news and clickbait journalism, undermining the credibility of this profession.

In conclusion, journalism is a dynamic field that continually evolves to meet societal needs. Despite the challenges posed by digitalization, the core principles of journalism remain unchanged. As we navigate through an era of information overload, the importance of journalism in disseminating reliable and accurate information cannot be overstated.

500 Words Essay on Journalism

Journalism, a profession of unveiling truth and shaping public opinion, stands as a pillar of modern democratic society. It plays a crucial role in the dissemination of information, ensuring that society remains informed about significant events, ideas, and trends. This essay will explore the nature of journalism, its evolution, and its impact on society.

The Nature of Journalism

At its core, journalism is about storytelling. Journalists are storytellers who communicate news about local, national, and international events to the public. They seek truth and report it in a fair, accurate, and unbiased manner. This truth-seeking function is essential in a democratic society, where informed citizens make decisions about who should govern and how they should be governed.

Evolution of Journalism

Over the years, journalism has evolved significantly. The advent of print media in the 15th century marked the beginning of modern journalism. However, the 20th century brought about a revolution in the field with the introduction of radio and television. These mediums expanded the reach of news, making it more accessible to the public.

The 21st century ushered in the era of digital journalism. The Internet has transformed the way news is produced, distributed, and consumed. Social media platforms and blogging sites have democratized journalism, allowing anyone with an Internet connection to share news and views. This has led to the rise of citizen journalism, which has both enriched and complicated the journalistic landscape.

Impact of Journalism on Society

Journalism’s impact on society is profound. It shapes public opinion, influences policy decisions, and holds those in power accountable. Investigative journalism, in particular, plays a critical role in exposing corruption, abuse of power, and other societal ills.

However, journalism also has its challenges. The rise of fake news and misinformation, particularly on social media, has raised questions about the credibility of journalism. The line between fact and opinion is often blurred, leading to biased reporting and public distrust.

In conclusion, journalism plays a pivotal role in society. It has evolved significantly over the centuries, adapting to technological advancements and societal changes. Despite its challenges, journalism remains a vital institution. It is a powerful tool that can be used to educate, inform, and influence. As we navigate the digital age, the importance of ethical, responsible journalism cannot be overstated. Through it, we can ensure that truth prevails, and democracy thrives.

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Home / Essay Samples / Sociology / Communication / Journalism

Journalism Essay Examples

Online information in nepal: deceiving and unreliable journalism.

Nowadays online information is deceiving and unreliable. The essay explores the urgent issue of journalism in Nepal as the growing media here is not trustworthy. This is because the journalists are publishing incorrect information which is not verified. Most of those sources are anonymous and fabricated...

Pros and Sons of Citizen Journalism

In the 20th century digital media production has become much more accessible by the introduction of cheap digital cameras, smart phones and easy to use editing software’s. This meant that larger groups obtained the means to create text, audio, images and video to share on...

The Impact of Citizen Journalism on the Traditional Media

Journalism is the profession which involves a person to stay on their toes for quickly and precisely accumulate, produce and broadcast the daily scoop of the world or the country. It is a stream which is very receptive towards technological developments. So, in the recent...

Differences Between Citizen Journalism and Traditional Media

Media has the power of swaying and shaping perceptions of citizens. It can develop these ideas by instilling fear, bias, or distorting information. International reporters have in the past indicated that the Press Freedom Index in many countries is low. The situation can be linked...

The Role of Citizen Journalism in Society

Journalism ethics refers to the symbols of morality that journalists are expected to respect. These include a commitment to revealing the truth objectively rather than subjectively motivated by self-interest; source privacy; and crediting what is said to the appropriate source. The media has the ability...

Violation of Code of Ethics

The Society of Professional Journalist’s Code of Ethics states that journalists should be honest and courageous while they “seek truth and report it”. Just last week, Fox news shared an article with the title “Paris attacks prompt fears France’s Muslim “no-go” zones incubating jihad”, blaming...

The Role of Media Ethics in Journalism

The following essay portrays a message about journalism practicality and trainings, and it highlights some of the very important and effective ideas and thoughts. In addition to that, the following essay will show the correlation between ethics in journalism and the public. The discussion of...

Impact of Citizen Journalism on Traditional Media

Traditional media have dominated the public sphere for the last century. Now, user-generated content has emerged as a competitor to the status quo of legacy media corporations. Des Freedman outlines media power as a relationship between different interests, engaged in struggles for a range of...

Evolution of the Nature of Journalism

From ancient times, journalism has been affected by technological developments throughout the history. The nature of journalism has always been shaped by industrial changes. The nature of journalism has been evolving from the time when Julius Caesar ordered the Acta Diurna by enabling distribution of...

Lester Holt – a Respectful American Journalist and News Anchor

Lester Holt, is the Multiple American award-winning black Journalist. Lester Holt, the newscaster that became an overnight sensation moderating the United States presidential debate and he interviewed Donald Trump on the James Comey Russian investigation controversy, the mastery with which he handled it earned him...

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