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“Jones is a bringer of light in the encircling gloom. He sees the printed newspaper continuing as a life force, ‘the beating heart of a community’; ‘a warm and comfortable medium … able to command a sustainable audience, just as books have done’; and altogether the product of a much-underappreciated ‘evolved technology’ that is a ‘portable, recyclable’ organizer of news values, easy to read and scan, and ‘a phenomenal bargain.’ ”
— The New York Times Sunday Book Review
“[In Losing the News] Alex Jones … manages to combine a dispassionate look at the news business with a page-turning story of traditional journalism's highs and lows. For Americans concerned about the fate of news, he breathes oxygen into the collapsing organ of the Fourth Estate. For inmates awaiting the guillotine, he is the governor's midnight call of reprieve. There is hope amid so much change.”
— Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post
“A must-read for anyone interested in the media, democracy, policy formulation, activism and in perpetuating the type of public conversations that have propelled national and global progress.”
— National Post, Toronto
“Alex Jones’s Losing the News is an important book…. It’s must reading for all Americans who care about our country’s present and future.”
— Dan Rather
“Losing the News is one of the clearest assessments to date of the sweeping technological and financial changes that overturned the modern tradition of objective newsgathering and dissemination.”
— The Boston Globe
“No one knows more about journalism than Alex Jones. No one watches it more scrupulously. No one cares more deeply for its future. Losing the News also proves that no one writes of the subject more persuasively or more beautifully.”
— Roger Rosenblatt
“The newspaper business is fighting for its life, writes Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Alex Jones in this penetrating analysis of an industry in turmoil…. How important is it? He writes convincingly about how gritty reporting of the facts about the war in Iraq turned many early supporters — despite their suspicions of the press — into opponents of the war. There’s much more of interest here, including an exploration of the ‘new’ news media and the story of the author’s own family’s small newspaper in Greeneville, Tenn., where he was first exposed to journalism in the 1950s and where his father and several brothers still work.”
— The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Dallas Morning News
“An authoritative account of why journalism is vital, how it has lost its bearings, and what can be done to reinvigorate this essential foundation of a democratic society.”
— Howard Gardner, Harvard University
“It should be required reading at some point in our school systems.”
— The Daily News, Newburyport
“An impassioned call to action to preserve the best of traditional newspaper journalism.”
— The San Francisco Chronicle
“In a style both compellingly personal and fully professional, Jones provides a concise social history of news, ethics and First Amendment issues. He then grapples with some fundamental questions. Is news, as presented by professional journalists, as essential to democracy as we tell ourselves? Can it survive on its own in a marketplace where the advertising subsidy is waning and the accompanying entertainment segments are being unbundled and peddled separately?”
— American Journalism Review
Listen
Terri Gross talks with Alex Jones on NPR’s Fresh Air
Jones discusses Losing the News on The Bob Edwards Show (part 1) (part 2) (part 3)
Watch
Alex Jones discusses the book on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
Interview on PBS’s Tavis Smiley Show
Jones talks with James C. Goodale, former vice chairman of The New York Times, on WNYE’s Digital Age
Richard D. Heffner, host of The Open Mind, discusses Losing the News with Jones (part 1) (part 2) (part 3)
Jones’s presentation at the Carnegie Council, New York, N.Y.
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