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I am grateful to John Thompson of Polity Press for inviting me to do this book. Since the 1970s I have been studying and writing about aspects of the news media, especially the history and sociology of American journalism. Putting what I know or what I think I know about journalism into a form suitable for young men and women seeking a quick tour of the field, and in a way that might also interest journalists and scholars, was a challenge I was interested to take on. It would force me to articulate in a more complete way than I had yet done what I think about journalism and why I think journalism, at its best, is so important. I am grateful also to John for honestly telling me a couple of drafts ago when he thought I did not have journalism’s story quite right.

Other trusted critics of earlier drafts include Julia Sonnevend, my wife and a media scholar in her own right. Julia was the first brave soul to make her way through the manuscript. I am grateful to her for pretty much everything in my life but, in this case, for her intellectual acuity and honesty.

Polity’s three anonymous reviewers were excellent – appreciative of the draft they saw but critical, too. Justin Dyer, Polity’s outstanding copyeditor, cleaned up so many sentences I had judged perfect and clarified so many passages I knew were crystalline – well, dear reader, thank heaven you do not have to read what he did! Adelina Yankova, a current Columbia Ph.D. student, helped with some eleventh-hour research and offered astute comments on the whole manuscript. My former doctoral student and now director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, read the manuscript and steered me clear of some pitfalls. I have benefited again from his informed and realistic assessment of journalism, as of democracy itself, and about what these two institutions can – and cannot – achieve. My Columbia Journalism School colleagues and students are visible in the text and the endnotes and I am grateful to Nicholas Lemann for having persuaded me to join the Columbia faculty in the midst of journalism’s digital transformations and the School’s attendant curricular changes. The very corridors of Pulitzer Hall reverberate with the ideals of journalism that this book tries to honor.