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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.

This chapter describes the US news industry in the nineteenth century. In the 1830s and 1840s, periodical articles were not copyrightable and were generally treated as a common resource to be reprinted without permission; this practice was actively facilitated by tailored postal rates and governed by informal norms amongst editors. Today, the news industry is a hotbed of IP conflict, with news corporations fighting in court over whether bloggers can reprint their headlines, whether “hot news” is proprietary, and whether Internet links constitute copyright infringement. The chapter suggests that IP law is an awkward fit with the needs and practices of journalism. It looks at late nineteenth-century disputes over “hot news” and shows that while these represent efforts to establish IP hegemony over news circulation practices, they continue to meet persistent challenges from non-IP ways of doing things.

In 2019, the European Union introduced a new copyright directive that provides news publishers a new right to be paid for the use of their works in the digital environment. The directive is squarely aimed at Google. Indeed, it is the latest step in a long history of European lawmakers seeking to regulate Google in order to support European news organizations. When navigating its way through the problems of Google News in Europe, Google has sought to appeal to the power of innovation, reframing disruption as opportunity, and doing everything it can to resist burdensome regulation. Indeed, the history of Google News in Europe shows Google leveraging its wealth, market power, and technological capabilities to compel and entice news publishers to work within Google’s system and according to Google’s copyright framework.

This first chapter summarizes how this book overturns conventional thinking about photojournalism, and the construction of the news more generally. Each subsequent chapter is briefly described, highlighting the unexpected findings. As described in this chapter, the first half of the book examines the news industry’s compulsion to self-censor certain images, and the second half examines exceptions.

This chapter considers how people use media and become an audience. More specifically, it examines why audiences move from one medium to another and how these shifts affect the business of media. It shows that members of an audience can be passive or active and explains how the Internet changes the way we think about audience activity. It also examines how the content and operation of media are influenced by audience activity. It argues that shifting audiences plays an important role in understanding online news. The chapter concludes by looking at the online audience in relation to the digital divide and how the audience will affect the news industry more generally.

The epilogue paints a portrait of the news industry of the interwar years. Buyouts and mergers produced behemoth newspapers that took the innovations of the preceding decades and refined them into a corporate model with true mass appeal. Yet editors and journalists ceased to experiment with the energy and creativity of their predecessors and instead settled into a comfortable pattern. Metropolitan papers of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s cultivated images of expertise and power consonant with the United States’ rising place in the world. They managed to keep threats from other forms of media, namely radio, at bay. At midcentury, generations of readers still treated newspapers as their primary and most trustworthy sources of news. They thought of their papers as friends, advisers, entertainers, critics, and conduits to the wider world. Though that is no longer true, and the heyday of the metropolitan newspaper is now decidedly over, turn-of-the-century newspapers continue to influence Americans’ expectations of news media.

This chapter sets Joseph Pulitzer's spectacular building for his paper, the New York World, against the moves uptown by the Herald and the Times that would begin the shift away from the nineteenth-century concentration on Park Row. Pulitzer's aim was to have the tallest building in the world and a shining beacon in New York City. At twenty-six stories and rising over three hundred feet from the sidewalk to the base of the lantern on top of the dome, the building achieved the height superiority and the notoriety that Pulitzer wanted. The chapter demonstrates how the taller structures signaled a new corporate presence in the city, as wealthy press barons with seemingly unlimited resources increasingly led the news industry. Publishers like Pulitzer built their offices on the uppermost floors from which they could survey the city, their readers, and their competitors.