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Download Merchants of Truth The Business of News and the Fight for Facts eBook Jill Abramson

Product details File Size 2011 KB Print Length 545 pages Publisher Simon & Schuster (February 5, 2019) Publication Date February 5, 2019 Sold by  Digital Services LLC Language English ASIN B07GNVQYYP

Merchants of Truth The Business of News and the Fight for Facts eBook Jill Abramson Reviews

• The struggles of four companies are discussed in detail including their history. The four companies are The New York Times, the Washington Post, Buzz Feed and VICE. I do agree that all four of these are an endangered species now. In the blurb for this book, it is stated that 60% if the workforce in the newspaper industry has been cut since the year 2000. The author was fired from the New York Times in 2004 and had attained the position of Executive Editor at that time.
  
  The Ochs motto of 'the news that is fit to print' has changed drastically due to the digital age. Each and every one of the four companies mentioned felt the impact of the wave of the digital age. The New York Times missed an opportunity with Face Book to expand as did the Washington Post with Google.
  
  The cost of advertising for print ads increased and the paid circulation for the papers decreased. In 2015, the average age of the print reader was 60 at the NY Times. And, the readers of the newspapers wanted the content to be free...on line.
  
  One thing that caught my attention was the Federal Communications Commission statement in 2011. They concluded that the independent watchdog foundation that the Founding Fathers envisioned for journalism....was at risk at the local level. Think about that for a few minutes. And, that was in 2011.
  
  With the advent of Google and Face Book, the newspapers had a difficult time keeping up. Paraphrasing the author. after 9/11, Google kept tabs on 150 news sources.... with reporting power of 4500 sources all over the world. In 2015, they were able to amass 50,000 news sources in 70 different areas. Just an exponential growth of power. Now, this becomes more interesting when one thinks about the manner in which the internet is used today. Most people are searching for titles with a limited amount of info... looking for a snippet of news.
  
  Being a statistician while in the Navy, I applaud the author's use of numbers in her research. All of the pertinent claims have been well researched and placed into the text.
  
  Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post as many will remember. He has always been a visionary and he said 'What is dangerous is not to evolve'. Sums up the manner in which the rise of the digital news has sky rocketed....
  
  Most highly recommended.
• Merchants of Truth tells the well-known story of the decline of print journalism in the digital age. (Ironically, as it turns out, certain parts are very well known. Abramson has already promised to excise plagiarism from the text. This makes the moral screed of the narrative not only grating but flagrantly hypocritical.) Journalists, for obvious reasons, tend to think and write a lot about this topic and Jill Abramson is no exception. In her mind the monopolistic papers of the late twentieth century were what the founders themselves intended as pillars of American democracy. Now they are a mix of true journalism and informative entertainment.
  
  Weaving accounts about the growth of the digital news companies Vice and Buzzfeed with what was going on at two of the nation’s major newspapers Abramson delivers many behind the scenes views and anecdotes but doesn’t really have anything new to contribute to the overarching narrative of traditonal media decline.
  
  Those who are, like Abramson, true believers in the creed that the monopolistic city papers in the pre-Internet era were “beacons of truth” and upheld journalistic standards far above those of today will lap up the descriptions of sordid doings at Facebook, Vice and Buzzfeed.
  
  But harkening back to the days when cabinet members were honored to eat in the executive lunchroom of The NY Times seems wistful at best and pernicious at worst. Does the new mass media really fail to provide citizens the information they need to vote and act responsibly in the public square? Aren’t problems like the lack of diverse points of view on people’s Facebook Newsfeed well known and resolvable?
  
  In short, is there any reason to read a 430 page elegy of the decline of the great age of newspapers? Personally, I don’t think so but lovers of traditional journalism may disagree. Abramson is a good storyteller but yet another postmortem on print journalism seems unnecessary.
  
  Some will love the exalted view Abramson evokes of the necessity and high moral calling of the profession. But those of us not in the media can skip this reveling about their heyday and whining about their increasingly profit driven business model. Only for true believers in the high church of journalism.
• Author Ian Frisch has provided convincing evidence of multiple examples of plagiarism in Merchants of Truth The Business of News and the Fight for Facts.
• Abramson provides an insightful insider’s look at the near destruction of journalism during the last 15 years.
  
  The book is gripping, having been deeply thought-out and researched. This makes it all the more bitter that some shoddy cut-n-paste took place. Rather than simply putting quotes around some passages from articles that provide relevant facts to support her arguments, Abramson lifts paragraphs wholesale and leaves the reader dependent on finding the attribution themselves in the endnote references.
  
  This is unacceptable, and goes far to make the main point of the book that untoward cost cutting in the service of obscene profits leads to unethical practices. I had the exact same experience working for a famous brand medical device company during the same period.
• I loved this book. Abramson's insightful narrative about 'new' media and old media is an excellent reminder about how much experience it takes to get the story and why that experience matters. Holding power accountable is not for the faint of heart. Merchants of Truth shows how old media and new media have worked to compete with each other in a rapidly changing environment in which getting at the facts and the accountability of politicians and corporations has never mattered more. At he same time, this book holds them accountable for how they do that work, and the choices they make in the face of mounting business pressures.