Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done to Fix It

The sudden meltdown of the news media has sparked one of the liveliest debates in recent memory, with an outpouring of opinion and analysis crackling across journals, the blogosphere, and academic publications. Yet, until now, a comprehensive and accessible introduction to this new terrain has been noticeably missing.

In Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights, celebrated media analysts Robert W. McChesney and Victor Pickard have assembled twelve seminal pieces on the crisis in journalism, revised and updated for this volume. Influential commentators provide a comprehensive portrait of the newspaper industry’s predicament—including a concise history of modern newspaper journalism; a hard-hitting analysis of the structural and financial causes of newspapers’ sudden collapse; and deeply informed proposals for how the vital role of journalism might be rescued from impending disaster.

Sure to become the essential guide to the journalism crisis, Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights is both a primer on the news media today and a chronicle of a key historical moment in the transformation of the press.

With contributions by: Eric Alterman, Paul Starr, Bree Nordenson, C. Edwin Baker, Yochai Benkler, Victor Pickard, Josh Stearns, Craig Aaron, Clay Shirky, David Simon, Robert W. McChesney, John Nichols, Leonard Downie Jr., Michael Schudson.