When MBAs Rule the Newsroom: How the Marketers and Managers Are Reshaping Today's Media,Used

From Library Journal The newspaper business is in trouble, and today's marketoriented, nonthreatening newspapers are planned and packaged on the basis of readership surveys: 'Give readers what they want.' Underwood, a former journalist and now a professor (Sch. of Communications, Univ. of Washington), attempts to measure the impact of this new style of journalism on the newsroom, the daily newspaper, and newspaper journalists, focusing part of his account on USA Today and the lead role Gannett has taken in this trend. Part 2 of the book presents the conclusions reached after surveying journalists' attitudes regarding the reshaping of their industry. Part 3 examines the consequences for professional journalism and newspaper readers today and in the future. Will the true values of this business'the craft of writing, vigor, and the sense of fairness and equity'survive in the MBArun newsrooms? Underwood can't answer this question, but he gives us some valuable insights. Recommended. Susan Awe, Jefferson Cty. P.L. System, Arvada, Col.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Product Description An indepth, behindthescenes look at the modern newsroom, this book explores how large corporations dominate today's media and uncovers how investigative and informative reports are being replaced by demands for highprofit, 'readerfriendly' journalism. Includes a new preface to the paperback edition. From Publishers Weekly Using interviews and surveys of journalists as well as academic analysis, Underwood describes the growth of less substantive, 'customeroriented' journalism, observing that, while journalistic values haven't completely eroded, idealistic staffers face new stresses. A former Seattle Times reporter now teaching communications at the University of Washington, Underwood does not provide the narrative vigor that enlivens James Squires's Read All About It: The Corporate Takeover of America's Newspapers (Nonfiction Forecasts, Dec. 14, 1992) or Howard Kurtz's Media Circus: The Trouble with America's Newspapers (Nonfiction Forecasts, March 1). Nevertheless, he provides a sobering portrait of trends toward business boosterism, the melding of advertising and news and the factoidrich style pioneered by USA Today . Newspapers, he suggests, will survive, but to thrive they should try not to ape television but instead to offer depth, context and perspective. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews Mencken is supposed to have said that it's a newspaper's job to comfort the afflictedand to afflict the comfortable. On the dismaying evidence of Underwood's thoughtful survey of the user friendly pap that now passes for print journalism, the famed editor's sly canon has become a very dead letter. A working reporter for 13 years before he began teaching at the University of Washington, Underwood offers a sobering appraisal of the newspaper business thatif not quite as lively as Howard Kurtz's Media Circus (p. 279)is appreciably more systematic and better documented. Paying close attention to the influence of a former employer (Gannett and its USA Today) as well as TV, the author focuses on how a new breed of marketminded, profitoriented executives has changed the face and shoddied the editorial content of newspapers throughout the country. Covered as well is the flashy makeover's impact on newsrooms that once were havens for nonconformist mavericks informed by a love of good writing and an absolute conviction that they were rendering an essential public service. Now, Underwood concludes, only team players willing to see their prose homogenized beyond all individual recognition need apply. In what appears to be triumph of hope over experience, the author closes on an upbeat note, pointing out that newspapers not only meet social and psychic needs but also set the agendas for broadcast media in today's wiredup world. A firstrate critique of the infotainment/