The Disputed Freedoms of a Disrupted Press explores the origins, connections, and contradictions evident amongst divergent understandings of press freedom around the world. Drawing on examples from various countries and cultures, this book distinguishes the universal right of free expression from the more complex and innately conditional liberties claimed by news media. It examines journalists’ common goals and norms in light of polarized and disordered information channels, reckonings with identity and privilege, diminished public trust, and altered revenue streams. The author discusses emerging forms of accurate, contextualized news production and argues that journalistic autonomy can be sustained only through demonstrated accountability for providing factual information about public affairs according to self-regulated professional standards. The book concludes by proposing a principle-based framework for enhancing the case for press protections and opposing disinformation while minimizing harm. Adopting this approach would require many publishers and editors to consider paradigm shifts and structural changes. This is a timely contribution to the body of literature on press freedom and will be a valued resource for advanced students and researchers seeking a contemporary understanding of journalistic practice and the evolving foundations of media law.

Based on extensive research into weekly rural publishers and rural readers, Reviving Rural News demonstrates that a new financial approach to community journalism is urgently needed and viable. This book provides historical context for the state of local news, examines the influence of journalistic identity and boundaries that have prevented change, and offers practical guidance on how to adapt the financial strategies of weekly newspapers to the habits of modern readers. Findings are grounded in robust data collection, including surveys, focus groups, and a year-long oral history study of a small weekly newspaper group in the United States. A new model known as Press Club is presented as a template via which memberships, events, and newsletters can better engage community journalism with its audiences and create a more sustainable path for the future. Reviving Rural News will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of local, community, and rural journalism as well as practitioners looking to bring about real-world change in journalism organizations.

The rights protecting journalists and the press in the United States are a defining aspect of the nation's democratic nature. What tends to be discussed less frequently is how today's media environment enables or hinders a free press. Has the internet made the press freer or restricted it in new ways? How do issues like funding, the role of media conglomerates, and legal actions against journalists and publications fit into a free media landscape? These questions will be explored from varying perspectives in this timely volume.

Through a synthesis of philosophical anthropology and media theory, this book examines the human relationship with technology, progressing from analogue to digital, to give a new perspective on journalism in the digital age. Journalism from Print to Platform takes a fresh look at the relationship between journalism as a craft shaped by its tools and considers anew the tools themselves. This book demonstrates that, with the emergence of digitality, what analogue print culture made possible and seemingly “natural” has now become unworkable. Digital logic constitutes a wholly different category of technology with a framework that makes fidelity in one-to-one exchange of analogue-to-digital in communication problematic. In short, the technology-based forms and practices that journalism developed as a fourth estate/public sphere enabler are, like us, irreducibly analog. Whilst we have mostly assumed that these would either adapt to or carry over with the shift to digitality, this book challenges that assumption and considers the important consequences of that realisation for the practice of journalism today. This challenging study is an insightful resource for students and scholars in journalism, media and technology studies.

An authoritative yet accessible analysis of the historical development and contemporary scope of press freedoms in America. Freedom of the Press: Rights and Liberties under the Law examines the evolution of press freedom in America, a particularly relevant topic given the controversy over the role of the press in the war in Iraq, as well as the growing concentration of ownership of the press, and the impact of the Internet on traditional journalism. An opening analysis of challenges from recent developments like Internet journalist Matt Drudge's "Drudge Report" illustrates the opportunities and implications of a press operating without the traditional gate-keeping process. A historical overview of philosophical ideas and English traditions precedes an exploration into the judicial, regulatory, social, political, and economic developments that have shaped press freedoms, addressing such issues as libel, free press versus fair trial, and access to courtrooms. A chapter is devoted to the impact of new communication and transmission technology such as videophones and satellites.

This interesting and unusual work examines the events, concepts, and interpretations that led to the emergence of the idea of freedom of the press in the United States and to the recognition of the concept of a free press in more than one hundred other countries. The calendar extends from the year 4000 BC to the present and chronicles the historical progress of freedom of the press, involving thousands of persons and thousands of publishing and media efforts, including newspapers, books, pamphlets, radio, television, and motion pictures. This in-depth study reports and examines the many events and circumstances which had considerable impact on creating freedom of the press, explores the subject in practical terms, and shows the idea of a free press as an ever-evolving and developing concept.

Does America have a free press? Many who answer yes appeal to First Amendment protections that shield the press from government censorship. But in this comprehensive history of American press freedom as it has existed in theory, law, and practice, Sam Lebovic shows that, on its own, the right of free speech has been insufficient to guarantee a free press. Lebovic recovers a vision of press freedom, prevalent in the mid-twentieth century, based on the idea of unfettered public access to accurate information. This “right to the news” responded to persistent worries about the quality and diversity of the information circulating in the nation’s news. Yet as the meaning of press freedom was contested in various arenas—Supreme Court cases on government censorship, efforts to regulate the corporate newspaper industry, the drafting of state secrecy and freedom of information laws, the unionization of journalists, and the rise of the New Journalism—Americans chose to define freedom of the press as nothing more than the right to publish without government censorship. The idea of a public right to all the news and information was abandoned, and is today largely forgotten. Free Speech and Unfree News compels us to reexamine assumptions about what freedom of the press means in a democratic society—and helps us make better sense of the crises that beset the press in an age of aggressive corporate consolidation in media industries, an increasingly secretive national security state, and the daily newspaper’s continued decline.