And That's the Way It Will Be: News and Information in a Digital World (Fast Track Book) [Hardcover]

Christopher Harper (Author)

Book Description

Series: Fast Track Book | Publication Date: May 1, 1998

The news media in the late twentieth century has become increasingly sensational and irrelevant to the lives of the American public. Network news shows frequently resemble entertainment programs, and major newspapers often fail to serve the interests of their communities. Young people in particular are casting aside newspapers and television news for computerized information and entertainment. In the wake of this shift, the convergence of digital technology, computing, and telecommunications has given rise to a new form of journalism: digital news.

And That's The Way It Will Be argues convincingly that digital journalism has the potential to reverse the decline in prestige of the mainstream media. Focusing on the public's dissatisfaction with traditional communication sources, seasoned journalist Christopher Harper evaluates computers as a means of providing and receiving news and information.

Harper profiles some of the key players in the world of digital journalism including Microsoft, America Online, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and Time Warner. He assesses the impact of digital news in poor neighborhoods and the developing world and explores the issues of pornography, privacy, and government regulation of the Internet's news and information system. The volume closes with predictions about the future by presidents of communications organizations, computer experts, network news anchors, software developers, columnists, on-line editors, and Web designers.

The first book to focus exclusively on the nature and future of journalism in an electronic age, And That's The Way It Will Be provides a comprehensive look at the emergence, challenges, and promise of digital news.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For a book ostensibly about digital journalism, And That's the Way It Will Be seems heavily entrenched in the predigital variety. Sure, Harper refers to Bill Gates and Steve Case--because, after all, they did launch Sidewalk and AOL, and you can't ignore those--but much of the rest of his "analysis" is rooted in traditional media companies who have decided to set up online divisions. "Although individuals can proclaim themselves reporters and put up a news site on the Web," he writes, "large companies tend to dominate the information business, primarily because brand names like Time and the Chicago Tribune provide a link with journalistic integrity." But many recent incidents--in the case of Time alone, one could list the "cyberporn" cover story based on fraudulent data, the darkened cover image of O.J. Simpson, and the hastily retracted story of nerve gas attacks in Vietnam--indicate that mainstream journalism has a severe credibility problem, and that consumers no longer have the same faith in "journalistic integrity" they once had.

Christopher Harper believes that the Internet can reverse the tide of public disdain for the media by providing a user experience that is immediate, interactive, and intimate. But what is a reader to do when confronted with a discussion of the major obstacles digital journalism must overcome that seemingly prioritizes the millennium bug and hackers over editorial accountability? What to make of a consideration of online news that has only superficial references to Salon and Slate and no mention of Matt Drudge? In addition to the lightweight treatment of digital journalism, there is much in And That's the Way It Will Be pertaining to online culture in a much more general sense that has already been better treated in other books, perhaps most notably Steven Johnson's Interface Culture.

From Library Journal

As recent coverage of the Monica Lewinski affair demonstrates, the race to post stories on the Internet can result in some very short-lived news items. Yet, even these well-publicized blunders have had little impact on the demand for up-to-the-minute news on the Internet. Veteran reporter and journalism teacher Harper, formerly with ABC and Newsweek and currently Roy H. Park Distinguished Professor of Communication at Ithaca College, explores new audience expectations, along with changes in technology and in the practice of journalism. Weaving vignettes of individual computer experiences with empirical data, he profiles current electronic media consumers and producers. He also draws from examples such as the Chicago Tribune's use of audio and video in its Internet edition to review the electronic activities of major media companies. While acknowledging issues of unequal access, pornography, privacy, and hate-group activity, Harper remains an optimist about the electronic future. His engaging writing style will attract general readers as well as journalists and journalism students. Recommended for public and academic libraries.?Judy Solberg, George Washington Univ., Washington, DC
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press (May 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814735762
• ISBN-13: 978-0814735763
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,790,976 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Quickly outdated, August 2, 2000

By 

"supernib" (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: And That's the Way It Will Be: News and Information in a Digital World (Paperback)

The highlight of this book is the series of anecdotes about the creation of various high-profile Web sites and the people behind them. Unfortunately, they lacked the depth to prevent them from being mere soundbites - quite the tease.

Enjoyable at first, once the book turns to speculation about the future of the Internet and its role, it becomes apparent that this book was penned by an old-school journalist who at best lacks the experience with the technology necessary to write about it, and at worst could be labled a technophobe.

The end result is a simplistic overview of the Internet as it relates to the media. Written in 1997, the book quickly loses credibility with the section devoted to the Y2K bug which was summarized with a statement to the effect that, no matter what we do to try to avoid it, it would definitely cause massive problems for everyone in every imaginable way, and the flippant comment about the improbability of affordable cable Internet access being made available to the public any time in the near future.

Harper is better off sticking to concrete facts. It's when he starts making unfounded predictions that his credibility - and the book - go down the drain.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Rather a Paranoid Description of the Way Things Were, May 3, 2002

By 

Elizabeth Benn (State College, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: And That's the Way It Will Be: News and Information in a Digital World (Fast Track Book) (Hardcover)

I do not need to say that Christopher Harper's And That's the Way It Will Be: News and Information in a Digital World is outdated; any book attempting to forecast internet capabilities in 1997 will inevitably be so by 2002. But I do need to say that this book represents an almost sickening trend in the very field it covers. Harper's hyper-journalistic style of "shorter is better" prose, analysis and famous anecdotes collapses under its fatuity, leaving the reader with the dissatisfaction of accounting for the book's missing substance and the time spent reading it.

That said, Harper does situate the current boom of internet news services within the larger journalistic profession and that entity's concerns for its continuing role in American society. He supplies charts that measure audience interests and recommends how the internet may be tapped to cater to those interests. Through biographies of Bill Gates, Elizabeth Osder and Richard Duncan, Harper suggests tactics for continuing journalistic excellence, including exploitation of internet media capabilities and the possibility for news stories unlimited by traditional print space. Most importantly, if judged by contemporary publications (little in this area, at least in book form, has been published since 1998) he raises the question of internet ethics in relation to the increasing battle between immediacy and accuracy of what's reported, a question not foreign to American news enterprises of the past century, and Harper unfortunately lacks an answer like so many other news writers reflecting on the state of their profession.

Harper is easy to read and offers a simple overview of the "genre" of news websites, and if you can get past the constant prophesies for the collapse of AOL, the annoyance at "herky, jerky" free streaming video clips, descriptions of rounds to the parties of now defunct "dot coms," and the impending apocalypse of Y2K, it is not wholly uninteresting. It is not wholly informative either.