The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
by Jill Abramson
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Feb 2019
544 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
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
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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.
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