Bill Plante's North Shore
It's not likely that Alex S. Jones' book, "Losing the News,'' will be a best seller in the popular sense, but I'll be much surprised if those who deal with the methodologies of communication don't study it because the author knows whereof he speaks.
This is not a review, it's one man's reaction to having read it. It should be required reading at some point in our school systems.
The information "business'' is in the middle of a revolution and has a collective impact on just about everything we do, how we do it, and why. "Losing the News" offers an introduction of the history of the journalism, what amounts to revolutionary changes in play, an overview of what needs preserving, and the explosion of opportunities for dissemination of information, opinion and propaganda.
Alex S. Jones' roots were nourished at The Greenfield Sun in Tennessee, circulation 15,000. He is one of the fourth generation of the family's continuing ownership. His career led to the New York Times, where he covered the press for nine years, and to Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. A Pulitzer Prize winner in 1987, he lectures in those fields at the Kennedy School of Government.
With all of that one might presume "Losing the News'' to be a heavy tome. It's heavy all right, but not in a way one might presume. He takes only 222 pages to report on what is surely to be regarded to have been a period of revolutionary acceleration in the gathering, processing and dissemination of information of news and opinion.
Not since the creation of moveable type and the later introduction of the Mergenthaler linotype has the production and availability of the written word been so unencumbered. Nor have the illustrations of events ever been so broadly available with so little effort by so many.
Would that the labor of discovery and the painstaking effort identifying the wheat of fact from the chattering chaff of opinion of the news be as easy.
Alex Jones' coverage of this is as straightforward as is likely to be found elsewhere, and he does it in nine chapters that should be must reading in every classroom and for every discipline. It's an easy read. It was in the digestion of it that I found myself shouting, "YES! YES! YES!"
The organization of content is straightforward. The prologue describing what's at hand in the publishing world of newspapers is right on. It's a personal account, engaging and relevant to both the past and present of what he was about as a journalist, and in mass communication as an observant scholar.
The titles of book's nine chapters are as revealing a group of what's central to communication as might be imagined.
The first chapter is what he calls "The Iron Core'' of each day's production of the news by those central to its gathering.
Chapter 2 is "Media and Democracy," Chapter 3 is "The Fragile First Amendment,'' Chapter 4 is "Objectivity's Last Stand,'' Chapter 5 is "Media Ethics — The Painful Balance,'' Chapter 6 is "The Curious Story of the News,'' Chapter 7 is "Newspapers on the Brink,'' Chapter 8 is "The New News Media'' and Chapter 9 is "Saving the News.''
I don't know that anyone has said it better. What I do know is that I have been involved in journalism since 1946, and I don't know how it could have been better or more succinctly done.
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Bill Plante is former executive editor of Essex County Newspapers. His e-mail address is plantejr@comcast.net.
