Journalism for the 21st Century

This is a book about the news--the way it is written and the forms it takes. It examines the relation between the content of public information and the potential effect of new technologies on the degree and type of information available in the public forum. Koch uses concrete, casebook examples to demonstrate the degree to which news information can be changed through the efficient and cost effective application of online bibliographic resources accessed by personal computers. He argues that new computer-based technologies will revolutionize news and public information by fundamentally altering the relation between writer and news subject. Koch shows how electronic databases, by making enormous amounts of data on virtually every subject available to the news writer or editor, have changed the equation that has defined the news since the 1920s.