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This introductory chapter examines various models for popularizing and democratizing news that have been influential in the United States over the past several decades. It argues that the U.S. news industry has undergone a philosophical paradigm shift, moving away from an ideal of professional autonomy and into a “postprofessional” period characterized by an affirmation that consumers' preferences should drive news production. The chapter also describes several attempts made by key groups of news producers to shift control over the news agenda away from professional expertise and put it in the hands of ordinary news consumers: the market-centered newspaper movement epitomized by Gannett's USA Today, the creation of a genre of news amid competition among the major U.S. cable news channels, and the growth of online social news sites tapping into collaborative filtering as a mechanism for democratizing the news agenda.

At any given moment there are a multitude of media options competing for the public’s attention. While some of these options include news, many others include entertainment offerings. This chapter discusses the underlying psychology of news consumption, including the obstacles and challenges that prevent news consumption and hinder news engagement, as well as the need to think of audiences in more specific ways. This understanding requires journalists to learn and develop a new skill set that marries news judgment with audience-based research. Today’s journalists need to know who consumes what, how, and why. With this knowledge, journalists have the ability to tell stories from a perspective that audiences care about and to create innovative distribution channels for their work. Such insight is necessary for combating the growing inequalities in how much people intentionally seek out news or incidentally consume it, or what researchers refer to as “news exposure.”

News literacy efforts address news content, production, consumption, and contexts to holistically explore the role of news in society, with a particular focus on the importance of news for informing self-governing citizens. Although news literacy is not a cure-all, it should be part of a broader solution to developing a media system that provides audiences with news and information that is relevant to their lives. With this in mind, we, as researchers, educators, practitioners, and professionals, need to think about how to teach news literacy and encourage its application. Research and practice should strive to improve news literacy, increase confidence in individuals’ abilities, and convince audiences that news literacy is applicable to their lives.

Fake news poses an interesting test case to theories of the epistemology of testimony. If they are to illuminate the nature of the epistemic challenges and harms fake news poses to (members of) a community, the theories themselves must move beyond several overly simplistic models of communication. After developing and criticizing some of these, this chapter goes on to offer a more nearly adequate model. The distinctive feature of the theory presented is that it goes beyond the reporter (speaker) and recipient (hearer), postulating several other roles people (and technology) play in communication. The upshot of these reflections is a case for thinking of epistemic responsibility in distinctly social terms—in terms of what we owe to each other as creatures who are both information-seeking and highly social.