Tracks power, privilege, and processes of community trust building in digitized media ecologies, focusing on public dialogues about racial inequality.

Gone is the era of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, when news programs fought to gain the trust and respect of a wide spectrum of American viewers. Today, the fastest-growing news programs and media platforms are fighting hard for increasingly narrow segments of the public and playing on old prejudices and deep-rooted fears, coloring the conversation in the blogosphere and the cable news chatter to distract from the true issues at stake. Using the same tactics once used to mobilize political parties and committed voters, they send their fans coded messages and demonize opposing groups, in the process securing valuable audience share and website traffic. Race-baiter is a term born out of this tumultuous climate, coined by the conservative media to describe a person who uses racial tensions to arouse the passion and ire of a particular demographic. Even as the election of the first black president forces us all to reevaluate how we think about race, gender, culture, and class lines, some areas of modern media are working hard to push the same old buttons of conflict and division for new purposes. In Race-Baiter, veteran journalist and media critic Eric Deggans dissects the powerful ways modern media feeds fears, prejudices, and hate, while also tracing the history of the word and its consequences, intended or otherwise.

The history of American journalism is marked by disturbing representations of people and communities of color, from the disgraceful stereotypes of pre-civil rights America, to the more subtle myths that are reflected in routine coverage by journalists all over the country. Race and News: Critical Perspectives aims to examine these journalistic representations of race, and in doing so to question whether or not we are living in a post-racial world. By looking at national coverage of stories like the Don Imus controversy, Hurricane Katrina, Barack Obama's presidential candidacy, and even the Virginia Tech shootings, readers are given an opportunity to gain insight into both subtle and overt forms of racism in the newsroom and in national dialogue. The book itself is divided into two sections, with the first examining the journalistic routine and the decisions that go into covering a story with, or without, relation to race. The second section, comprised of case studies, explores the coverage of national stories and how they have impacted the dialogue on race and racism in the United States. As a whole, the collection of essays and studies also reflects a variety of research approaches. With a goal of contributing to the discussion about race and its place in American journalism, this broad examination makes Race and News an ideal text for courses on cultural diversity and the media, as well as making it valuable to professional journalists and journalism students who seek to improve their approach to coverage of diverse communities.

A unique theory of trust building in engagement journalism that proposes journalists move to an ethic of care as they prioritize listening and learning within communities instead of propping up problematic institutions. In How Journalists Engage, Sue Robinson explores how journalists of different identities, especially racial, enact trusting relationships with their audiences. Drawing from case studies, community-work, interviews, and focus groups, she documents a growing built environment around trust building and engagement journalism that represents the first major paradigm shift of the press's core values in more than a century. As Robinson shows, journalists are being trained to take on new roles and skillsets around listening and learning, in addition to normative routines related to being a watchdog and storyteller. She demonstrates how this movement mobilizes the nurturing of personal, organizational, and institutional relationships that people have with information, sources, news brands, journalists, and each other. Developing a new theory of trust building, Robinson calls for journalists to grapple actively with their own identities--especially the privileges, biases, and marginalization attached to them--and those of their communities, resulting in a more intentional and effective moral voice focused on justice and equity through the news practice of an ethic of care.

As cash-strapped metropolitan newspapers struggle to maintain their traditional influence and quality reporting, large national and international outlets have pivoted to serving readers who can and will choose to pay for news, skewing coverage toward a wealthy, white, and liberal audience. Amid rampant inequality and distrust, media outlets have become more out of touch with the democracy they purport to serve. How did journalism end up in such a predicament, and what are the prospects for achieving a more equitable future? In News for the Rich, White, and Blue, Nikki Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of field research, she illuminates how journalists decide what becomes news and how news organizations strategize about the future. Usher shows how newsrooms remain places of power, largely white institutions growing more elite as journalists confront a shrinking job market. She details how Google, Facebook, and the digital-advertising ecosystem have wreaked havoc on the economic model for quality journalism, leaving local news to suffer. Usher also highlights how the handful of likely survivors—well-funded media outlets such as the New York Times—increasingly appeal to a global, “placeless” reader. News for the Rich, White, and Blue concludes with a series of provocative recommendations to reimagine journalism to ensure its resiliency and its ability to speak to a diverse set of issues and readers.

The Journalist-Audience Relationship -- The Promise of Audience Engagement -- Journalism's Imagined Audiences -- When Data and Intuition Converge -- First Imagined, Then Pursued -- The Obstacles to Audience Engagement -- Understanding News Audience Behavior -- Conclusion.

Donald Trump might have been the loudest and most powerful voice maligning the integrity of news media in a generation, but his unrelenting attacks draw from a stew of resentment, wariness, cynicism, and even hatred toward the press that has been simmering for years. At one time, journalism's centrality in reporting and interpreting important events was relatively unquestioned when a limited number of channels and voices produced a consensus-based news environment. The collapse of this environment has sparked a moment of reckoning within and outside journalism, particularly as professional news outlets struggle to remain solvent. Alternative voices compete for attention with and criticize the work and motivations of journalists, even as a growing number of journalists question their core norms and practices. News After Trump considers these struggles over journalism to be about the very relevance of journalism as an institutional form of knowledge production. At the heart of this questioning is a struggle to define what truthful accounts look like and who ought to create them or determine them in a rapidly changing media culture. Through an extensive accounting of Trump's relationship with the press, and drawing on in-depth interviews with journalists and textual analysis of news events, editorials, social media, and trade-press discussions, the book rethinks the relevance of journalism by recognizing the limits of objectivity and the way in which journalism positions certain actors as authority figures while rendering the less socially powerful invisible or flawed. This ethos of detachment has staved off vital questions about how journalism connects to its audiences, how it creates enduring value in people's lives (or not), and how diversity needs to be understood jointly at the level of production, reporting, and audience in order to rebuild trust.