Customer Reviews

The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect, Completely Updated and Revised

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Where are the Walter Cronkites of the world?

I don't know the answer to this question, but I have often wondered what happened to those highly respected, eminently fair, seemingly unbiased journalists who used to grace our television sets and newspapers.

This book, written by journalists on behalf of a group of high level, very concerned journalists, directly addresses in a most lucid and intelligent manner their belief that something is "seriously wrong" with their profession.

If awareness is indeed the first step on the road to recovery, this book bodes well for the development of a new journalism, one that is in sync with the electronic age and will, much like Walter Cronkite, inform us of the facts and encourage us to form our own opinions, as is our right and responsibility as citizens.

If you are concerned about our democracy and the important role that journalism plays in preserving it, I encourage you to read this excellent book.

Robert E. Levasseur, Ph.D., president of MindFire Press (www.mindfirepress.com).

As a journalism student, I found this book to be a valuable read. My journalism classes tend to be discussion-format with few absolutes and lots of conditionals. In that respect this book was worthwhile, if for nothing else than its laying out a sort of journalistic ten commandments.

The book can best be summarized as a state of the union address for journalists, examining the way things stand in the industry, how they got there and where they may be going. It does this within a context of a refresher course of Journalism 101 fundamentals, massaged and embellished slighty so that people familiar with the concepts won't simply skim over them. Some people may take issue with the authors' views on bias and conscience, but you can't say they don't make a decent case for them.

Most of the book will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with journalism today, but Kovach and Rosenstiel do a good job of delivering it in a concise and interesting way. In more than a few chapters they retread ground they covered earlier, which got a little annoying after a while. Other than those instances, the book is very well-written and is a good read for anyone who is involved with journalism, either as a consumer or as a producer.

This book is deeply informative and technical, yet it maintains entertaining elements and a can't-put-it-down pace -- I read it in less than a week.

Kovach and Rosenstiel get at the true meaning of what it is to be a journalist. They convincingly make the case for saving journalism -- showing that it is an imperative task if our democracy is to survive intact.

This book should be required reading for journalism students and professionals -- and those citizens who are serious about their news consumption and participation in our great democracy.

I stumbled across this book and I am glad that I did. True journalism is an important part of America's heritage that is being challenged (and often simply ignored) by today's "media". The pace of changing technology today makes old fashioned journalism look obsolete to many, but it is actually more important than ever. How well journalism adapts to these changes will determine our country's future. The authors provide expert counsel on this complex subject in a surprisingly readable and interesting style.

I loved the book when it first came out (and excitedly touted it to others), and it has been updated for the new age of journalism. The problem is, this new age of journalism is the era of the craft's death.

If every publisher in America had read this eight years ago, we might be better off ... but I suspect it wouldn't have made that big a difference. RIP Rocky Mountain News, Seattle P-I, etc.

I would've given the service 5 out of 5, but I didn't want to look like I was part of the company. The delivery was before the scheduled date and the book was in great condition, even though they only promised "Good." I would recommend this service.

Despite the admirable intentions of the book as a whole, I found it to contain several rather unprofessional ideas. In chapter 8, for instance, the two men claim that a journalist must render "interesting and relevant" those matters he or she personally finds significant. It was hopefully less an assertion than an observation inserted to thicken the book, although chapter 10 would imply that the former is the case.

Chapter 10 regrettably contains the two Liberal authors' assertion that journalists such as they ought to be permitted by society to freely report through their own personal ideologies. Indeed, one would hope that these two otherwise proficient communicators merely miswrote their thoughts when they said that "journalists have an obligation to exercise their personal conscience" (sic).

If all journalists really were to produce reports inspired even in part by their own biases, the public would have every reason to mistrust the press. For, what is propaganda - a benchmark of what Americans claim to hate - but spun news at its core? In the minds of Americans, the purest form of journalism contains no human undertones in its execution, but collections of facts arranged into a readable or otherwise receivable format by an intelligence deaf to the voices of whatever moral philosophies or political leanings it might harbor. Pure journalism would report its own demise without a hint of grief.