Reviews for Experiments on the Red and Quill Peruvian Bark; With Observations on Its History, Mode of Op...

The average rating for Experiments on the Red and Quill Peruvian Bark; With Observations on Its History, Mode of Op... based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-02-12 00:00:00 Colin Mckay For no particular reason, I had The Business of Journalism sitting on my various bookshelves for 20 years or so before I finally read it. Things changed more than a bit in those 20 years. Personally, I went from being a sophomore journalism major when I first got the book, to being a middle-aged attorney when I finally read it. And journalism evolved from a business centered on print and television media ostensibly rooted in time-honored journalistic tradition to a brave new world of "fake news" in which the old-school news organizations struggle to stay afloat as they vie with social media and upstart web-based media sources. In a sense, the world described in The Business of Journalism is an antiquated one. The book barely touches on the effect of internet on journalism, mostly because, when the book was published in 2000, the internet hadn't fully taken hold of the older forms of media. And social media as we know it in 2021, which has completely altered our collective consciousness, wasn't yet a gleam in its creators' eyes in 2000. From this perspective, reading this book made me a bit nostalgic for those bygone days when media conglomeration was the thing we were most afraid of. But, when viewed from another angle, The Business of Journalism still has a lot to say about our contemporary media world in 2021. Jay Harris's essay, for instance, raises concerns with the "Hollywoodization" of the news, something that has grown seemingly exponentially in the intervening time period. Harris also talks of the pitfalls of having too much information at our fingertips and a press corps that is unable to put that information in context, leading to the paradox of a citizenry that is less and less informed even as it has access to more and more data. Other essays raise similar points that are still relevant today. And John Leonard's essay, which concludes the book, is quite an enjoyable read, even if I don't know what to make of the portentous significance of the fact that he slips in a reference to Donald Trump as a "presbyter of the Big Fix" in the book's final sentence. So, if you're reading this asking the question, "Is it worth finally picking up The Business of Journalism after it's sat unread on my shelf for 20 years?", I say, "Go for it."

Review # 2 was written on 2013-11-24 00:00:00 Chris Moreton excelllent