Ghosting the News, as the bearer of very bad news about the news itself, adopts an aptly funereal feel. But Sullivan—a media columnist at The Washington Post, a former public editor at The New York Times, and a longtime chief editor of The Buffalo News—is also offering an opportunity: to recalibrate our vision ... To write a book like Ghosting the News is to take on the challenge of proving a negative—to make a case for the urgency of the known unknown. Sullivan succeeds. Her book is an ink-bound alarm bell. The threat Americans face, she argues, is not just the news that lies. It is also the news that will never exist in the first place.
In Sullivan’s conversations across the country, readers told her they were aware of the problem — they saw local news as increasingly partisan or shallow. But they apparently hadn’t made a crucial connection: The decline in quality is due to the erosion of the industry’s financial foundation ... This lack of awareness of the threat facing local news is the essential problem Sullivan’s book addresses. She is sounding an alarm. She’s not the first to explore this crisis, but her book succeeds in its aim of delivering an urgent message in a concise way ... Sullivan does not advocate a particular approach. She is interested, she says, in 'anything reasonable' that supports the function of local news.
[An] insightful, sobering analysis of the modern news landscape ... Sullivan emphasizes that she isn’t simply bemoaning the demise of an industry because she has devoted her professional life to it. What is at stake, she says, is democracy itself ... Another proposed solution sparks Sullivan’s well-deserved skepticism: direct government subsidies for news outlets. Money means control ... Let’s hope that readers will be able to follow the story, and find out the answers, in well-staffed, reputable, healthy local news sources.
Sullivan is the perfect person to diagnose the problem ... Sullivan’s book ends on a bleak note ... Call it a leap of irrational faith, but I think the prognosis is premature ... Ultimately, Sullivan’s pessimism about local journalism is as much a verdict on our culture as anything — and can you blame her? ... If we are going to rebuild trust in journalism, it will have to happen from the ground up, as part of a broader renewal of our civic institutions.
... a brisk and pointed tribute to painstaking, ordinary and valuable work ... [Sullivan] attempts to strike a hopeful note can sound unsatisfying because of how problematic all the solutions are.
If Ms. Sullivan’s book had been published 10 or 20 years ago, I suspect she would have found much more room to discuss the need for diversity in the newsroom ... Ms. Sullivan dutifully mentions that, as editor of the Buffalo News, she 'aggressively hired people of color' but otherwise leaves the topic alone ... Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that a Washington Post columnist couldn’t find a negative word to say about the practice of journalism in America’s newsrooms, but I thought perhaps she might give it a throwaway paragraph. Nope. Ms. Sullivan writes of 'journalism' sometimes of journalistic 'talent,' as though it’s a natural resource, the same in quantity and quality at all times ... But perhaps I’m naive to think 'America’s premier media critic,' as the book’s back cover proclaims Ms. Sullivan to be, would dare to criticize the media.
A dire warning on the decline of daily newspapers and the danger that their disappearance poses for democracy ... the author’s goal isn’t to lament the good old days of once-mighty businesses. Instead, she trains her eyes on the 'news deserts' that now litter the landscape and voices concern about how corruption will consume communities that no longer have media watchdogs ... A no-nonsense retort to the notion that we live in a time of abundant information.
