This book reflects on matters I have pondered for many years – from the largely salutary (but consider chapter 4) professionalization of journalism to the misunderstandings of politics that arise from the overemphasis on the “informed citizen” as the moral ideal for democracy. The book integrates some other topics that I should have pondered more (populism, the place of news in everyday life, what technology does and does not “do” to social experience, and whether the “slowness” of democracy should be recognized as a great virtue or as a problem). The significance of professionalism is an underlying theme throughout, and this goes back in my own writing 40 years, but the topic is more fresh and more urgent today than ever. I have been enabled to reconsider it by teaching for the past decade at a “professional school” – the Columbia Journalism School, and I am grateful to the Journalism School and to Columbia University for having provided me this opportunity.

At the same time that I have become an up-close local, observing journalists and journalism, I have become more engaged as a cosmopolitan in an international community of research and thinking in “journalism studies.” I am grateful to my colleagues (especially Todd Gitlin, Richard John, and Andie Tucher) in our Journalism School-centered boutique-style doctoral program in communication, to our remarkable students from around the world, and to our alumni who continue to give guidance and moral support to our current students – and to me.

This book would not exist were it not for the director of Polity Press, John Thompson, whose encouragement over many years has been invaluable. In this case, he believed that this volume could and should stretch beyond providing a handy piece of luggage for collecting and transmitting already published papers; it should propose new ideas, recasts old ones, and articulate what it means to claim that journalism still matters. I am grateful also to the excellent staff at Polity, including copyeditor Sarah Dancy.

Thanks to John, there is new life in this book. It is not the only new life in my life. My two-and-a-half-year-old marriage to Julia Sonnevend is new to me still, full of fine adventures that open me to the world afresh, and with a love that only deepens. That love is now enhanced by Noah Peter Schudson, six miraculous months old. If he is not headline news, I don't know what is.

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book.

Chapter 1 originally appeared as “Fourteen or Fifteen Generations: News as a Cultural Form and Journalism as a Historical Formation,” American Journalism 30/1 (2013), pp. 29–35. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.

Chapter 2 originally appeared as “Walter Lippman's Ghost: An Interview with Michael Schudson,” Mass Communication & Society 19/3 (2016), pp. 221–9. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.

Chapter 4 originally appeared as “Autonomy from What?” in Rodney Benson and Eric Neveu, eds., Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), pp. 214–23.

Chapter 7 originally appeared as “The Crisis in News: Can You Whistle a Happy Tune?” in Jeffrey C. Alexander, Elizabeth Butler Breese, and Maria Luengo, eds., The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered: Democratic Culture, Professional Codes, Digital Future (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 98–115. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.

Chapter 9 originally appeared as “The Multiple Political Roles of Journalism,” in Bruce E. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., Media Nation: The Political History of News in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), pp. 190–205. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.

Chapter 11 originally appeared as “Second Thoughts: Schudson on Schudson,” Journalism Studies 18/10 (2017), pp. 1334–42. Reproduced with permission of the publisher. Journalism Studies can be found online at https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjos20.