In an essay headlined “Can Journalism Be Saved” in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Nicholas Lemann discusses On Press along with several other recent books about the news industry. Lemann, who is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the former dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, writes in part:
Pressman adeptly shows how a number of forces converged to produce a new, and now disappearing, form of newspaper journalism. Newspapers became almost entirely economically dependent on advertising, partly because most of them calculated that underpricing their subscriptions would pay off in larger circulation that would justify higher advertising rates….
No source of funding for journalism comes without the potential for editorial distortion. In the days of daily newspaper street circulation wars in the early twentieth century, the push was toward sensational crime coverage. During the advertiser-supported golden age, as Matthew Pressman points out, it was toward consumption-promoting lifestyle journalism. He also observes that reader-supported Internet journalism pushes editorial content in a more ideological direction—one that reaffirms, rather than challenges, what a news organization’s audience already thinks. So does cable news.