Food at 12:30 pm. Discussion begins at 12:45 pm. Everyone invited.

In the face of the current economic crisis of the American newspaper, various reassessments are underway of what was good or bad about the news content these papers provided us, what resources are necessary to preserve or enhance the elements worth preserving, and what new developments might make for a better journalism than we see today — better, perhaps, than we have ever seen. This paper contributes to that reassessment and tries to do a bit of dreaming about what new digital resources, including more useable and accessible databases, might mean for news.

Bio:

Michael Schudson is Professor of Communication at the Journalism School, Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard in 1976 and taught at the University of Chicago 1976-80 and the University of California, San Diego 1980-2009 before coming full-time to Columbia. The author of seven books on the history and sociology of the American news media, U.S. political culture, collective memory, and other related topics, his most recent works are Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press (2008) and, co-authored with Leonard Downie, Jr., a report entitled, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” (2009…available at www.columbiajournalismreport.org).