The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
by Jill Abramson
The definitive report on the disruption of the news media over the last decade.
Merchants of Truth is the groundbreaking and gripping story of the precarious state of the news business told by one of our most eminent journalists.
Jill Abramson follows four companies: The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and VICE Media over a decade of disruption and radical adjustment. The new digital reality nearly kills two venerable newspapers with an aging readership while creating two media behemoths with a ballooning and fickle audience of millennials. We get to know the defenders of the legacy presses as well as the outsized characters who are creating the new speed-driven media competitors. The players include Jeff Bezos and Marty Baron (The Washington Post), Arthur Sulzberger and Dean Baquet (The New York Times), Jonah Peretti (BuzzFeed), and Shane Smith (VICE) as well as their reporters and anxious readers.
Merchants of Truth raises crucial questions that concern the well-being of our society. We are facing a crisis in trust that threatens the free press. Abramson's book points us to the future.
"Starred Review. [O]ne of the best takes yet on journalism's changing fortunes." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. A highly readable combination of significant topic, deep reporting, endlessly fascinating anecdotes, and vivid writing." - Kirkus
This information about Merchants of Truth was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jill Abramson is a senior lecturer at Harvard University. She also writes a bi-weekly column for The Guardian about US politics. She spent seventeen years in the most senior editorial positions at The New York Times, where she was the first woman to serve as Washington bureau chief, managing editor, and executive editor. Before joining the Times, she spent nine years at The Wall Street Journal. The author of Merchants of Truth, she lives in New York City.

If you liked Merchants of Truth, try these:
by Julian Rubinstein
Published 2022
An award-winning journalist's dramatic account of a shooting that shook a community to its core, with important implications for the future
by George Packer
Published 2014
A riveting examination of a nation in crisis, from one of the finest political journalists of our generation.
by Thomas Friedman
Published 2007
A timely and essential update on globalization, its successes and discontents, powerfully illuminated by one of our most respected journalists.
Children are not the people of tomorrow, but people today.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.