Welcome!
I hope you will find this an honest and useful
resource about media, values and democracy. The Articles and Quotes sections offer my thinking about the future of news in this
changing world of Internet and global entertainment, the role
of journalism in a democracy, the importance of ethics, what's
wrong with much of today's journalism, and other lessons I've
learned over 30 years as journalist and teacher.
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Ellen Hume
January 2010 Clipping
“The Death of Newspapers?”
Why should we worry about the death of newspapers?
Reading any newspaper is pretty much a two-dimensional, impersonal, top-down, one-way, and often stupefying experience. News reports are infuriatingly self-referential and incomplete. If they stir us up they don’t give us any place to go. Is this civic engagement? The endless stream of revelations and problems, celebrities and disasters, seems disconnected from our own personal choices and public solutions. Too often, newspaper readers feel like “passengers in the back seat of the car, howling at the driver,” as MIT Prof. William Uricchio once put it.
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