Gypsysavage’s Weblog

Vincent Campbell’s Information Age Journalism is an intelligent examination of the purposes of journalism in a new era of electronic communication. From the processes of the dissemination of news, the values of sources and news gathering, to the ideal of objectivity that is most times (if not all the time) lacking in the field, Campbell calls for a new working definition of journalism, a rare request these days.

With such a great sense of how news and information is selected for public consumption, and after urging the wider intellectual world to rediscover the use of journalism and to begin a new conversation about its current state in relation to its political reality, Campbell fails at his task in one huge way: there is no discussion in his book about electronic news media. If the issue of newsprint media in the “information age” is a task worthy of a book, then why would Campbell miss the mark completely by avoiding one of the greatest forces in the information community?

Campbell makes use of his book in specific instances as he points out the decline of newspaper audiences worldwide, supported by formidable and unnerving evidence that readers are disappearing by the thousands, but he does not speculate just where these people are going, or whether they are even reading news at all. One suggestion – and a natural inclination – would be to say that these vanishing acts are reemerging in the most independent news forums to date.

If Campbell, a lecturer of political communication at the University of Leicester, took on the issue of electronic media, he would have had one of the most complete studies of journalism I’ve read.