Reshaping the News ― Community, Engagement, and Editors

Reshaping the News: Community, Engagement, and Editors is the culmination of a six-year search for an economic resolution to the digital business conundrum facing the newspaper industry. Today’s media tend to generate journalism with a low immediate newsroom impact, allowing journalists to continue reporting without considering the audience’s increasingly dominant role in a story’s longevity. This renders newsrooms as managed rather than led, and turns editors into facilitators—managing project-driven journalism, attempting to match publishers’ expectations of diversified income streams, and providing reporters with increased autonomy. In fact, newsrooms require a new kind of leadership, one that rethinks its relationship with the audience.

Reshaping the News argues for that alternative, deconstructing the reporting and editing relationship and illustrating the ideal version of editorial oversight. Author George Sylvie dissects reporter communities and culture, as well as the connection between journalism and geographic space/management. The book also examines whether journalists have developed the appropriate infrastructure to assure credibility and avoid potential mishaps, misconduct, and misrepresentation. Though the innovative, non-traditional approach to audience engagement outlined within challenges journalistic boundaries, Reshaping the News posits its new model as necessary and of potential lasting value to the field of journalism.

George Sylvie earned his Ph.D. from and is Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies newspaper innovation and decision-making, and his work spotlights editors, value systems, management style, online markets, diversity, and reporting. He has authored books on reporting, media management, and decision-making.