C.W. Anderson on Rebuilding the News and the news ecosystem in Philadelphia

On Thursday, March 28 at 5:30 p.m., the Center for Public Interest Journalism and the Temple University Department of Journalism will present C.W. Anderson on his recent book: Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age, published by Temple University Press:

Journalism appears to be in the midst of an epochal change, equivalent in magnitude to the emergence of the Penny Press in the 1830s. But how much of this digitally enabled transformation is surface-level only? What about it is enduring? And what are the more fundamental scholarly problems that these changes— real or not– bring to light?

Anderson tackles these questions by zooming in on the news ecosystem in one major American city: Philadelphia, PA.

Rebuilding the News is the first scholarly work to take seriously the notion that the analysis of 21st century journalism needs to go beyond “the newsroom” to examine the densely networked communication environment of an entire geographic region. The book looks at tabloid reporters, bloggers, social media experts, programmers, and online journalists in order to probe the nuances of the Philadelphia media ecosystem, and uses this ecosystemic analysis as a framework for thinking about the transformation of metropolitan journalism more broadly.

Part ethnography, part digital media history, Rebuilding the News lays bare the long-term connection between changes in journalism and the way we think about American politics, “the public,” and the techniques by which professional workers construct truth claims in the 21st century.

C.W. Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island (CUNY) and the Director of Research at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is the co-author, along with Clay Shirky and Emily Bell, of Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present. He has contributed scholarly articles to numerous academic journals and several edited collections.

The event is open to all and will meet Thursday, March 28, 5:30- 7 p.m., in Tuttleman 304 on the Main Campus at  Temple University. <map>

Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing.