• News for the Rich, White, and Blue

  • How Place and Power Distort American Journalism
  • By: Nikki Usher
  • Narrated by: Regina Hopper
  • Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins

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News for the Rich, White, and Blue  By  cover art

News for the Rich, White, and Blue

By: Nikki Usher
Narrated by: Regina Hopper
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Publisher's summary

As cash-strapped metropolitan newspapers struggle to maintain their traditional influence and quality reporting, large national and international outlets have pivoted to serving listeners who can and will choose to pay for news, skewing coverage toward a wealthy, white, and liberal audience. Amid rampant inequality and distrust, media outlets have become more out of touch with the democracy they purport to serve.

In News for the Rich, White, and Blue, Nikki Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of field research, she illuminates how journalists decide what becomes news and how news organizations strategize about the future. Usher shows how newsrooms remain places of power, largely white institutions growing more elite as journalists confront a shrinking job market. She details how Google, Facebook, and the digital-advertising ecosystem have wreaked havoc on the economic model for quality journalism, leaving local news to suffer. Usher also highlights how the handful of likely survivors well-funded media outlets such as the New York Times increasingly appeal to a global, “placeless” listener.

News for the Rich, White, and Blue concludes with a series of provocative recommendations to reimagine journalism to ensure its resiliency and its ability to speak to a diverse set of issues and listeners.

The book is published by Columbia University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

©2021 Columbia University Press (P)2024 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"A riveting must-read for anyone interested in why journalism is stumbling in trying to serve the public good." (Sue Robinson, author of Networked News, Racial Divides)

"An insightful and important book." (International Journal of Communication)

"Nikki Usher has written a remarkable book about the death–and possible rebirth–of the local newspaper." (Open Democracy)

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