This book began as an informal conversation. During a meeting at one conference or another, a Polity editor mentioned that the Press had begun a new series, Key Concepts in Journalism, and asked what I thought. I said it sounded like an excellent idea, and then I said something like, “and you can’t publish such a series without a volume on journalism and the public.” It is, after all, perhaps the key concept in journalism. No series would be complete without a book on the subject. She agreed, and then said, “You should write it.” I quickly said yes. Later, I realized maybe I had answered too quickly. When I agreed to write the book, I had in mind a compendium of “greatest hits” on the subject, one that began with Tocqueville, grappled with Lippmann and Dewey, and made a long detour into Habermas’s public sphere. It is a litany anyone acquainted with our field could recite. “I can write this book,” I said to myself with some confidence.

Well, it has turned out to be the hardest piece of writing I have ever completed. I thought I knew my subject pretty well, but it turns out I was mistaken. In the past several decades, an enormous amount of work has been accomplished across a range of subfields. Some of this work has been published by scholars outside of journalism studies, in disciplines that rarely intersect with our own. Early on, for example, I spent six months lost in a fascinating literature on early modern English news. Published primarily by historians, in their own disciplinary journals, this literature is nonetheless extraordinarily important for understanding the history of journalism’s relationship to public life. Other work has been completed by scholars of journalism, but has appeared across small subfields, like the study of Scandinavian journalism, or comparative journalism studies, or production studies, or news and technology studies. Still other work, borrowed from field theory or institutionalism, has trained a new theoretical lens on journalism. For a scholar used to burrowing into his own subfield of news production studies, reading across this work was difficult. But as I read, I began to feel that, though they wrote for different audiences about different topics, these literatures together were telling a broader story about journalism, and at the heart of this story lay some conception of the public. I knew then that writing a book on the “greatest hits” would not suffice.

It took a good long while for me to be confident that I had canvassed these literatures sufficiently. It took another length of time to piece the story together, and longer still to explain it in a way that might make sense to an interested (but not expert) reader. This last point is important, as I expect a good number of experts will read this book. As I set about my task, I realized that I had taken on a great deal of risk, namely, the risk of mischaracterizing or misrepresenting an argument, or theme, within a particular subfield. It is a risk anyone takes who attempts to write across several disciplinary subfields, which may be one reason it is not often done. As a hedge against this risk, whenever possible, I have consulted with the experts.

I run another risk as well. It is that the volume may not attend to a particular detail, concept, or argument in the way that an expert might wish I had done. An expert in field theory, for instance, may remark that I haven’t done the theory justice. I should have dwelt longer on this point, or emphasized that concept. Or, an expert on a given national news system may complain that I have missed important contextual nuances about her subject. This is a more subtle risk than simply getting something wrong, and the risk is therefore more difficult to hedge against.

I worried about this dilemma for some time. Eventually, I resolved that my intention was to write for a lay audience. I wished to introduce this audience to the broad story of journalism under development in the scholarship, and to show how and why the concept of the public is vital to this story. For this reason, I chose to summarize ideas that experts might wish to unpack, and (where possible) I avoided becoming tangled in disputes they may wish to prosecute. Throughout, I provide citations for the reader interested in accessing the more dense and detailed conversations taking place in these literatures. My choices may not satisfy some experts in the various subfields. But I hope most come away from the exercise with the realization that I have not done egregious harm to their arguments., and I hope they leave with a greater appreciation for how their work contributes to the larger narrative developing in the field.

More than this, I hope that lay readers come away impressed with the centrality of the public’s role in this story. If I have achieved this much, I will have met my goal.