Columbia University Press News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism

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. Review In this thought-provoking book, Usher contends that journalism that is not anchored in or accountable to community in the broadest sense poses an existential risk to democracy. News for the Rich, White, and Blue is an absorbing account of how elite, isolated journalism drives social polarization--and a compelling vision for how a media commonwealth can fortify the fourth estate and renew a sense of common purpose.--Alondra Nelson, president of the Social Science Research Council News for the Rich, White, and Blue provides clear-eyed accounting of the monumental challenges facing American journalism and the rare non-nostalgic examination of how we've arrived here. Today, everyone is a media critic, but there are two distinct types: those who criticize with the aim of further discrediting the press and those who offer critiques because they dream of a better and thus stronger fourth estate. It's clear that Nikki Usher belongs to the latter group, and it would serve our industry and our democracy for us to truly wrestle with the implications of her research and what they should mean for our path forward.--Wesley Lowery, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Deeply evidenced via a lens of power and privilege, News for the Rich, White and Blue catalogues place-based transformations for the press as symbolic of the nation's polarization. In her argument that journalists are becoming distanced from those they cover--geographically, politically, economically, and culturally--Nikki Usher is both convincing and provocative. A riveting must-read for anyone interested in why journalism is stumbling in trying to serve the public good.--Sue Robinson, author of Networked News, Racial Divides: How Power and Privilege Shape Public Discourse in Progressive Communities In News for the Rich, White, and Blue, Nikki Usher has illuminated one of the hidden crises of democracy: the fact that mainstream journalism is increasingly trusted mainly by aging, white, affluent liberals. With critical ideas about the meaning of place, she has opened crucial new territory to our understanding of the public square, especially locally. This is an important book.--Tom Rosenstiel, coauthor of The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect Usher has written this book with the narrative style of a journalist and the research skills of a social scientist. We finally have a book that explains the deep threats to Americ