Book review: Two books about journalism

February 20, 2025

Journalism is back in the news, with talk about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the generation of content, disappearing local papers, staff layoffs, and with a Federal election approaching, bias and the reliability of content.

Here are reviews of two books about journalism written by people who know what they are talking about.

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The Men Who Killed The News by Eric Beecher
The inside story of how media moguls abused their power, manipulated the truth and distorted democracy.

Eric Beecher is the publisher of the online news magazine Crikey, and has had a long career in journalism, working as a senior editor for several important papers including at least one owned by Rupert Murdoch.

This book is a good history of the explosive growth and subsequent shrinkage of the news business across the world. The excesses, influence and practices of some of the great names in the business like Pulitzer, Hearst, Beaverbrook, Black, Ailes, the Graham family, the Murdochs (of course) and others is well covered and explained. Strangely, when we talk about the Murdochs' domination of the Australian media it is sobering to read about the way the media is controlled, often by violence and murder, in other parts of the world. The devil you know ...

As well as "ancient" history, the book goes into the challenges that the media has faced over the last few years from social media and other places that have taken over the advertising revenue that once provided "rivers of gold™" to newspapers. (Google's advertising revenue approaches and maybe exceeds the total for all newspapers in the world!). There's a chapter on how AI is changing what we see and read (and not always in a good way) and the rise of podcasting. The big challenge is that much of social media is provided for free to users because their eyes are sold to advertisers and AI can direct targeted advertising based on the sorts of things we say or look at (everyone must have experienced getting ads from Facebook in an incredibly short time after using certain words or visiting certain web sites). Newspapers, radio and television have to show ads that they hope will resonate with readers - social media can do it without the "hope" part.

So, is there a future for the "old media"? Almost certainly, but the glory days of printing an extra 500,000 papers because there's a royal engagement announcement on the front page have gone forever. There will always be niches to fill, and while they won't necessarily make the niche fillers into billionaires, they still serve a useful purpose.

Highly recommended.

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Storytellers by Leigh Sales
Questions, answers and the craft of journalism

This is a quite different book, because it's an anthology of articles about journalism by people in the trade. The list of contributors on the cover gives some idea of what a reader might expect, and even if some of the names might not be familiar there can be no doubt that a reader will learn a lot about what it means to tell stories and tell them well.

Because it's an anthology there's no need to read it from Page 1 onwards, but wherever you dip into it you will be certain to find good writing about how good writing and communicating is done. And if your favourite journalists aren't there (a few of mine are missing) it doesn't matter - everyone couldn't be there but by reading the book you might even find a few more favourites.

Again, highly recommended. 

Both books are either available from Oberon Library or by interlibrary loan.

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