News at Work ─ Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance

Before news organizations began putting their content online, people got the news in print or on TV and almost always outside of work. But now most of us keep an eye on the headlines from our desks, and we have become accustomed to instant access to a growing supply of constantly updated stories on the Web. This change in the amount of news available as well as how we consume it has been coupled with an unexpected development in editorial labor: rival news organizations can now keep tabs on the competition and imitate them, resulting in a decrease in the diversity of the news. Peeking inside the newsrooms where journalists create stories and the work settings where the public reads them, Pablo J. Boczkowski reveals why journalists contribute to the growing similarity of news while consumers find this increasingly dissatisfying. News at Work offers an enlightening perspective on living in a world with more information but less news.

"News at Work is a vivid, inside look at the collision of print journalism and electronic media. Based on close access to the leading news organizations in Buenos Aires, Boczkowski documents how contemporary journalism is caught in the grip of emulation; this spiral of imitation exacerbated further by global news media and their intensifying homogenization. The portrait of this transformation of the news is both fascinating and deeply worrying, and is guaranteed to provoke debate." Walter W. Powell, Stanford University

"This is a brilliantly creative study of the new world of news. Boczkowski takes us on a far-ranging exploration---from the newsroom to the business office, the reporter's cubicle to the reader's desktop---on which we get a panoramic view of the links between the production, distribution, and consumption of digital media. Discovering that both online news companies and print papers emulate each other, he takes a close look at the dynamics of imitation, explicating the imitative life cycle through rich accounts of news production, use of technology, and news consumption. Boczkowski already has a reputation for rigorous scholarship; this book is better than anything he has published to date." Eric Klinenberg, New York University

"In a world of increasing abundance of information and increasing imitation, Pablo Boczkowski offers something different---a novel, parsimonious explanation for why news stories often look the same across many outlets. Using qualitative and quantitative analysis of the workplace worlds of both journalists and readers, he convincingly describes how the Internet can turn breaking news into a homogenized commodity." James Hamilton, Duke University

Pablo Boczkowski is professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and the author of Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers.