A mostly productive roadmap for rejuvenating journalism in a fast-moving, fragmented world.
How newspeople can save their profession.
Rosenstiel, a press critic and journalism professor, presents a solid case that news organizations’ problems are bigger than they realize. Along with declining public trust and countless newsroom layoffs, the industry faces an “intellectual” crisis. Woefully behind the times, journalists must embrace “emotionally intelligent newsgathering” that “meets audiences where they are.” Seasoned reporters may blanch at his quasi-therapeutic terminology, but it’s backed by concrete ideas. Rosenstiel proposes 10 ways journalists can save their profession, urging them to put less emphasis on “watchdogging” scoops and more on work that “helps people.” He praises nonprofit LAist’s efforts to help its audience navigate bureaucracies, connect with one another, and improve their communities. Citing social science research, he wants journalists to “acknowledge alternative worldviews.” An article correcting misinformation about climate change might be more persuasive to conservative-leaning readers if it mentions commercial opportunities associated with addressing the problem. Journalists should embrace artificial intelligence, using it to identify falsehoods and build a so-called Civic Internet of useful data obtained from governments. Meanwhile, journalists can demonstrate “competence, benevolence, and accountability” by doing their work as transparently as possible. They should also more open to new storytelling methods and more intentional in how they listen to their audiences’ “questions and needs.” This is a thoughtful contribution to an important conversation. But if Rosenstiel is big on imperatives—journalists must “invent new products” and do “constant” fact-checking—he has little practical counsel for carrying them out with slashed newsgathering budgets. And if his optimism about AI’s “tremendous potential for journalism” is backed by encouraging evidence from newsrooms, he doesn’t seriously reckon with the broader threats AI poses to industry jobs. He allows that AI has “serious trust problems,” feebly advising journalists to “manage and mitigate them.”
A mostly productive roadmap for rejuvenating journalism in a fast-moving, fragmented world.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2026
ISBN: 9780593800195
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: tomorrow
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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