Un libro bellissimo.
Tutto statunitense, costruito su due media vecchio stile (Washington Post e New York Times) e due nuovi media (Vice e Buzzfeed) e su come questi media abbiano affrontato il cambiamento nella "preparazione" delle notizie derivante da Internet e dai social media.
Quello che mi ha stupito e che si parla ANCHE di giornalismo e di giornalisti, in terza o quarta battuta. Prima ci sono la tecnologia, la modalità di comunicazione, i mezzi per la raccolta dati,....
Libro molto bello, che consiglierei a chiunque "da grande" volesse fare il giornalista. ( )

In un libro importante, per foliazione e contenuti, Jill Abramson, prima donna a ricoprire il ruolo di direttore del New York Times, prova a fornire una originale lettura del momento attuale del mercato dell’informazione negli Stati Uniti. E lo fa partendo, da brava giornalista, dai fatti, dalle storie di due colossi storici dell’informazione a stelle e strisce, il New York Times e il Washington Post, e due siti di informazione di grande successo, Vice e BuzzFeed. L’autrice racconta le storie dei giornali, degli editori e dei giornalisti, e partendo dalle storie riesce a dare un senso alla direzione del mercato delle notizie. Iniziando dalla demolizione del concetto dell’informazione gratuita sul web che ha creato danni difficilmente recuperabili per gran parte delle imprese editoriali. La chiusura di centinaia di quotidiani storici e la perdita di decine di migliaia di posti di lavoro è stata probabilmente frutto dell’incapacità da parte degli editori e dei manager di leggere il futuro del web e di comprendere le vere opportunità del digitale, troppo legati a schemi desueti e dalla facilità di risolvere i problemi con i tagli. I nuovi siti d’informazione, nativi digitali, hanno invece imposto i loro modelli che macinavano enormi numeri che hanno da subito attirato capitali importanti. Ma vedendo, invece, il conto economico l’impressione è che dietro quei numeri ci fosse l’interesse della grande finanza a trovare facili guadagni nella compravendita dei titoli piuttosto che nel rendimento dell’impresa. Un libro importante che consente delle serie riflessioni sul momento del mercato editoriale negli Stati Uniti e, di conseguenza, in prospettiva in Europa. Un viaggio interessante nel cuore dell’informazione mondiale. ( )

I can't say I enjoyed this overly long book which discusses the changing ways in which people are getting their news. Subscriptions to print media (newspapers) have been falling over the years, while more and more people are only getting their news from on-line sources and social media. In Merchants of Truth, Jill Abramson, a former NY Times editor, writes about her personal career at the Times, about the changes going on with print media and how they figured out how to compete in a digital format, and about the rise of social media as a source of news for people today, especially among younger Americans.

Abramson spent some time discussing how on-line services like Vice and BuzzFeed began, and a little more about how sources such as Facebook and Politico became accepted and significant sources of news. She also explained in some detail who the key developers of the various social media feeds are, how "clickbait" is so commonly used to get "hits" which brings in revenue, and how users are easily and frequently manipulated.

Today, it's easier than ever to remain in an echo chamber of your own beliefs. Social media, favorite blogs, television networks, talk radio, etc., offer up a continual stream of information dedicated to a specific point of view of political beliefs, and people can choose only from those sources which reinforce their biases. For many, it's easy, and comforting, to choose only sources which feed us news we're most likely to favor, news we're most likely to want to see. Those politically oriented sources have the effect of simply reinforcing preexisting beliefs among readers.

One thing which seemed true is that so much of the "news" on politically oriented blogs and social media is often unverified, inflammatory, or simply made-up just to get "clicks". Finding news that fits your biases and preconceptions does not mean it's true, nor does finding news which challenges your beliefs is necessarily false. I never trusted much of what I saw from social media before reading this book, and will trust even less going forward. ​An important message I received from this book is that before simply buying into any controversial "news" report, check it out from various news sources, at least one of which is likely to covers news from a different perspective. ( )

Jill Abramson offers a thorough overview of several major news organizations' transition to the digital age, with a focus on four in particular: NYT, WaPo, BuzzFeed, and Vice.

This book is dense, with very few breaks in the very long chapters. Much was uninteresting to me, but I kept reading for the sake of the tidbits that offered me glimpses of what goes on behind the scenes to give me the news I consume every day.

I was least interested in Vice - the interests of its barely-legal male target demographic in no way coincide with my own. NYT & WaPo, OTOH, I read weekly and daily respectively, so those were the inside scoops I was really showing up for. ( )

I listened to the entire book Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson. This book was based on an earlier book written by David Halberstam that was a Pulitzer Prize winner. The author of Merchants of Truth was a former executive editor of the New York Times and she chronicles the demise of the big national daily newspapers by concentrating on the Washington Post and the New York Times. She contrasts them with BuzzFeed and Vice. Her conclusions are that the newspapers are coming out on top of the news once again, with the newer on-line sources reverting to the tried and true methods of the old fashioned newspapers and their fact checking style of reporting. However, she says that the biggest problem with the new news sources is that when they start to really report the news instead of relying on "20 ways to reduce belly fat" type of articles, they start bleeding money. Her chapter on Facebook and how its algorithms works was very important and enlightening. Essentially Facebook relies on what she calls the "happiness factor" - find out what the poster likes and feed him more of the same thing. This creates a feedback loop which was exactly what Cathy O'Neil talked about in Weapons of Math Destruction.

I ended up reading parts of this book when I got to Kansas because I couldn't just keep replaying the parts I didn't understand on the audio. This book is really important for people who want to understand how Trump got elected, but I would recommend that you read the book rather than listen to it. ( )