Out of Print

George Brock, a veteran journalist who spent decades at The Times of London as feature writer, Foreign Editor, Saturday Editor, and Managing Editor before directing a university journalism school, argues that journalism is undergoing a transformation driven by digital technology. He contends that while the business models sustaining news organizations face severe threat, journalism itself, understood as an idea and a set of values, is more resilient than the institutions that practice it. The book traces journalism's full arc from the invention of the printing press through the digital age, examining how news publishing has always been shaped by commercial imperatives, technological change, and democratic purpose.

Brock begins by establishing that mass-market journalism is a relatively recent phenomenon, having emerged only from the mid-19th century onward. He defines journalism as the systematic, independent attempt to establish the truth of events and issues that matter to a society in a timely way, while acknowledging that conceptions of truth and independence have shifted across eras.

The historical survey opens with the earliest European news publications in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, which emerged as appendages to printers' businesses driven by commercial intelligence needs along trade routes. In England, the Civil War of the 1640s briefly suspended press controls, introducing eye-witness reporting and political polemic, but the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 reimposed censorship. The repeal of the Licensing Act in 1695 unleashed a surge of experimentation; by 1750, London had five daily papers, six appearing three times per week, and five weeklies. Publications like The Spectator, founded in 1711 by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, created the first large, loyal readerships through distinctive editorial personality. Across the Atlantic, American colonial conditions favored a press that served as political glue binding isolated communities, culminating in the First Amendment's unprecedented legal protection for press freedom. The French Revolution produced an explosive burst of publishing, with nearly 500 newspapers in Paris by 1792, before Napoleon reimposed complete control.

Brock traces journalism's transformation into a mass-market industry beginning in the mid-19th century, framing the shift around four New York newspapers founded between 1833 and 1851, each representing different mixtures of commercial ambition and moral purpose. In Britain, the abolition of taxes on knowledge between 1853 and 1861, combined with steam-powered presses and expanding railways, created conditions for a publishing industry of unprecedented scale. Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, founded the Daily Mail in 1896, and by the early 1920s controlled newspapers with a combined circulation of 6 million copies. This concentration of media power generated sustained debates about press responsibility, including Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin's accusation of power without responsibility and the American columnist Walter Lippmann's argument that volatile public opinion should be insulated from newspaper manipulation.

The book's account of the second half of the 20th century, often seen as journalism's golden age, reveals that the commercial foundations of print were eroding well before the internet arrived. The founding of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) under John Reith in the 1920s introduced a state-created broadcasting monopoly that set a benchmark for standards. Total sales of British national papers peaked between 1950 and 1955, and American newspaper circulation per 1,000 people fell 55 percent between 1950 and 2008. The Watergate investigation in the 1970s dramatized the press's power to hold government to account, but television deregulation in the 1980s fragmented audiences further. Quality newspapers responded by increasing opinion and analysis; popular papers expanded celebrity coverage, with the Daily Mail's website, MailOnline, eventually becoming the most visited newspaper site in the world. Throughout this period, newspaper advertising's share of the total media market was in long decline, falling sharply around 2000.

Brock catalogues the internet's overlapping disruptions to journalism's business model: decentralized distribution undermining media oligarchies; the migration of classified advertising to free listing sites like Craigslist (US newspaper classified revenue fell from $18 billion in 2005 to $9 billion in 2008); and the failure of rising internet advertising to replace falling print revenue, because infinite online inventory drove prices down. Google's targeted advertising model allowed precise measurement of ad effectiveness, upending a system that profited from imprecision. US newspaper total advertising income fell from $63.5 billion in 2000 to $19 billion in 2012, and total industry employment fell 44 percent between 2001 and 2011. Brock invokes the disruption theory of Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, who argues that legacy companies must run two business models simultaneously without holding the new to the standards of the old.

The book examines how digital communications have blurred the boundaries defining journalism. With barriers to publishing lowered or eliminated, the question of what defines a journalist becomes pressing. User-generated content and social media allow faster, more plural reporting, but they also increase unverified information and create vulnerabilities to manipulation. Brock cites public-relations professional Ryan Holiday's account of exploiting bloggers paid by pageview, who have direct incentives to write sensationally rather than accurately. The WikiLeaks case illustrates the continuing importance of institutional credibility: Hundreds of thousands of leaked documents attracted little attention when posted raw on WikiLeaks' platform but reached a global audience when partnered with established newspapers that could verify and explain the material. Brock uses the Arab uprisings of 2011 as a case study, arguing that while social media raised the pulse rate of protest, physical factors, including military force, demographics, and regimes' willingness to shed blood, ultimately determined outcomes.

The book's account of journalism's credibility crisis in Britain centers on several scandals. In 2003, investigators found thousands of requests for private information from newspapers in the office of private detective Steve Whittamore, an episode known as Operation Motorman, yet no journalists were prosecuted. The phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World, Rupert Murdoch's Sunday tabloid, began with the 2006 arrest of its royal correspondent and a private detective for intercepting voicemail messages. News International, the Murdoch subsidiary owning the paper, insisted the hacking was the work of a single rogue reporter, but this claim unraveled after The Guardian reported in 2009 on large settlements suggesting wider involvement, leading to the Leveson Inquiry, a public investigation into the culture, practice, and ethics of the press. Brock also examines the MMR vaccine scandal as a failure of quality journalism: Media gave equal standing to the fraudulent claims of researcher Andrew Wakefield, who alleged a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism, and the scientific consensus refuting those claims. British vaccination rates fell from 92 percent to 80 percent, and measles cases rose from 56 in 1998 to 1,370 in 2008.

Brock criticizes the Leveson Inquiry for taking little evidence from online news media and for treating the press as a coherent category at a time when the boundaries of journalism were dissolving. He proposes an alternative approach centered on strengthening public interest defenses across criminal and civil law, arguing that if court cases depended on demonstrating genuine editorial standards, editors would have a powerful incentive to enforce their own codes of conduct.

The final chapters survey experiments through which journalism is being rebuilt. Brock identifies four irreducible core tasks that define journalism regardless of platform: verification, sense making, witness, and investigation. He profiles hyperlocal sites in Britain, digital-native start-ups in New York such as Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo and Jake Dobkin's Gothamist.com, and the accidental growth of Jersey Shore Hurricane News from casual Facebook weather posts into a site with 200,000 followers. He notes a pattern of popular sites gaining editorial ambition, with the Huffington Post winning a Pulitzer Prize and Buzzfeed investing $46 million of venture capital in political coverage, while warning that advertising entanglements risk compromising editorial independence.

Brock concludes that no single business model will replace the advertising cross-subsidy that sustained 20th-century journalism. The future will require varied combinations of subscription, advertising, philanthropy, sponsorship, and what some digital publishers call revenue promiscuity: income assembled from events, conferences, donations, and multiple streams. He argues that journalism will survive if those rebuilding it carry the best of the past into the new era. Existing institutions have been too cautious to experiment disruptively enough, while agile challengers have done better. Journalism's enduring value must now be made visible again by a new generation.