In keeping with the spirit and theme of this essay, this has been a collaborative effort, inadequately accounted for by the authors’ names on the cover. All of us have benefited from observations, conversations and counsel from our colleagues who have taken time to support this effort in one way or another. Our first thanks goes to Charles Berret, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia Journalism School, who has been with us all along and helped both coordinate and think through the various aspects of this work. We couldn’t have done this without Charles.
We thank Dean Nicholas Lemann of Columbia Journalism School, whose vision for this examination of the journalism landscape gave the project its start. None of this would have or could have happened without him. Others in the Columbia administration who aided us greatly in the process were Sue Radmer, Stephen Barbour and Anna Codrea-Rado. We thank Marcia Kramer for her patient copy editing and suggestions.
We are indebted to the support of the Carnegie Corporation, the funder of this work. We would also like to thank the Tow Foundation for its ongoing support in all our work at Columbia through the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. The largest collection of voices represented here, and the people who gave the most time, participated in a two-day meeting and workshop, held in New York City on April 17-18, 2012. Attendees included Chris Amico, Laura Amico, Josh Benton, Will Bunch, Julian Burgess, John Keefe, Jessica Lee, Anjali Mullany, Shazna Nessa, Jim O’Shea, Maria Popova, Nadja Popovich, Anton Root, Callie Schweitzer, Zach Seward, Daniel Victor and Christopher Wink. It is no exaggeration to say that we began that meeting with a disparate set of observations and ended it with the outline of this work.
Throughout the process, we have relied on the observations of our peers, either as interviewees on the present and future state of journalism, or as respondents to early drafts of the work. For that, we thank Erica Anderson, John Borthwick, Steve Buttry, David Carr, Andy Carvin, Susan Chira, Reg Chua, Jonathan Cooper, Janine Gibson, Kristian Hammond, Mark Hansen, Andrew Heyward, Alex Howard, Vadim Lavrusik, Hilary Mason, Bethany McLean, Javaun Moradi, Dick Tofel, Matt Waite and Claire Wardle. University faculty, working inside and outside traditional journalism schools, proved to be vital sources of intellectual provocation and nourishment; we thank, in particular, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford and Michael Schudson and Robert Shapiro of Columbia University.
Thank you, lastly but not least, to our families for the tolerance, support and advice throughout.