A spidery network of mobile online media has supposedly changed people, places, time, and their meanings. A prime case is the news. Digital webs seem to have trapped "legacy media," killing off newspapers and journalists' jobs. Did news businesses and careers fall prey to the digital "Spider"?
 
To solve the mystery, Kevin Barnhurst spent thirty years studying news going back to the realism of the 1800s. The usual suspects--technology, business competition, and the pursuit of scoops--are only partly to blame for the fate of news. The main culprit is modernism from the "Mister Pulitzer" era, which transformed news into an ideology called "journalism." News is no longer what audiences or experts imagine. Stories have grown much longer over the past century and now include fewer events, locations, and human beings. Background and context rule instead.
 
News producers adopted modernism to explain the world without recognizing how modernist ideas influence the knowledge they produce. When webs of networked connectivity sparked a resurgence in realist stories, legacy news stuck to big-picture analysis that can alienate audience members accustomed to digital briefs.
 

Kevin G. Barnhurst was Chair of Communication in the Digital Era at the University of Leeds and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His books include Seeing the Newspaper, The Form of News: A History, and Media Queered: Visibility and Its Discontents.
 

"Ambitious and fascinating… A worthy invitation to further research and discussion about the role of journalism in society."--International Journal of Communication

"This is a magisterial book, required reading for anyone seriously interested in the recent history or future of journalism. . . . Virtually every chapter has multiple insights worth consideration on their own, and it will, as important books do, generate future scholarship of note."--Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly