What Can a Journalist Do?

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Around the turn of the twentieth century, an Irish bartender in Chicago named Martin J. Dooley described how newspapers “comfort the afflicted” and “afflict the comfortable.” This idea has since become a cliché, often brandished as a noble statement of journalistic purpose. Others have echoed the idea without echoing the phrase. The newspaper baron Joseph Pulitzer (after whom the Pulitzer Prizes were named) once said that journalists should, among other things, “oppose privileged classes and public plunderers” and “never lack sympathy with the poor.”

Not that everyone likes the sentiment. “There is nothing inherently wrong with being comfortable,” the conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2022, “and afflicting the comfortable—or anyone else—without good reason is almost the textbook definition of being a jerk.” In their classic book The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel describe the phrase “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” as having unfortunate liberal overtones. Journalism’s role as a “watchdog,” they argue, is “deeper and more nuanced than the literal sense of afflicting or comforting would suggest,” and “more properly means watching over the powerful few in society to guard, on behalf of the many, against tyranny.”

While I’m loath to throw out a perfectly good cliché, the words “afflict” and “comfort” aren’t the best that Dooley could have chosen. Reorient the phrase around the concept of power, however, and the phrase remains a useful manifesto for journalism.

In some countries, there is still a tradition of journalism that takes afflicting the comfortable quite literally. “In each paper, there’s a will to fuck over the powerful,” a newspaper journalist acquaintance in the United Kingdom told me, making clear that he thought this a good thing. “There’s a real appetite to just go after people.” (Of course, in a class-based society, there are limits to this mindset. The British media going after members of the royal family tends to be frowned upon. Well, parts of the royal family. Just ask Meghan Markle.)

On the whole, mainstream newsrooms in the United States have tended to be less aggressive toward those in power. Interviews with officials, for example, are often more courteous and less tough than in the UK; it is rare to hear US interviewers ask a recalcitrant politician the same question twelve times, as the British TV journalist Jeremy Paxman famously did to the Conservative politician Michael Howard in 1997. Nonetheless, the US has its own strains of journalism that are irreverent and sharp. “I think that the role of the journalist is always to punch up,” Frankie de la Cretaz—a journalist who covers sports and the LGBTQ community, among other things—told me. “I’m always thinking about who has power.”

Rather than afflict the comfortable, we might say that it is a journalist’s job to scrutinize the powerful. This maxim is worth interpreting expansively; in most societies, more than Kovach and Rosenstiel’s “few” exert power, even if only a relative few have high-level political authority. “I think of power as something diffused through the social body,” Jem Bartholomew, a British journalist and CJR contributor, told me. “Where there is power—whether that’s in a welfare office, whether that’s a boss over their cleaner, or whether that’s a legislative body—those are sites where power could potentially be abused.”

This maxim of scrutinizing the powerful, wherever they may be in society, is hard to flip on its head in a pithy, Dooley-esque way. Some might like to throw out the notion of journalism comforting the afflicted altogether. But others seem attached to the idea, or something resembling it. James Carey wrote about the idea of news as a “ritual.” If it is, it need not be a comforting one—but it can be, bringing a community together to mourn a shared tragedy, for example. In 2023, Ed Yong, the science writer whose sweeping coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic won him a Pulitzer Prize, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times considering how journalists should treat people suffering from the long-term effects of the disease. “Contrary to the widespread notion that speaking truth to power means being antagonistic and cold,” Yong wrote, “journalists can, instead, act as a care-taking profession—one that soothes and nurtures,” including by making “people who feel invisible feel seen.”

The idea of journalism providing comfort in dark times is not one that I oppose, per se. Again, though, I think that it works best if we frame it around the concept of power. If comforting the afflicted is a clunky idea, journalists, in my view, can usefully empower the disempowered—albeit, perhaps, with more caveats than apply to their duty to scrutinize the powerful.

One way journalists can empower people is, as Yong suggests, simply to share their stories, an act that can make people feel seen and bring their problems to the attention of those able to do something in response. “My interest in covering poverty and the reason that I think it’s so important is that those people toward the poorer end of society are typically forgotten by the media,” Bartholomew, who has extensively covered economic hardship in the UK, said. It can feel as if “no one wants to hear about it—the camera is focused elsewhere.” When we spoke, Britain was in the throes of a “cost-of-living crisis” that was getting widespread media attention—but mostly, Bartholomew suggested, because the middle classes were feeling the pinch as well.

Journalists can also empower people by ensuring that they have access to the information that enables them to make decisions about their lives and needs, either by providing that information themselves or by holding other actors accountable for failing to provide it. Still, if the point of such work is to make sure that people have the information they need to make important life decisions, journalists must also respect the agency of those making the decisions—an agency that implies the ability to be held to account for them. For journalists to treat certain people as being beyond scrutiny is to condescend to them.

Of course, power is always relative. Even within a community that we might broadly see as disempowered in society, some members likely have more power than others. And the costs of failing to maintain a constantly critical perspective, even out of well-intentioned reflexive sympathy, can be grave, not least for disempowered people themselves.

In 2018, US news organizations were reporting on claims that Roy Moore, a Republican Senate candidate in Alabama, had sexually abused teenagers. (He denied wrongdoing.) One woman told a Washington Post reporter that Moore had impregnated her when she was fifteen. After doing some digging, the paper identified discrepancies in her story, and eventually dispatched video journalists to stake out the offices of Project Veritas, a right-wing group specializing in sting operations aimed at embarrassing the mainstream media and liberal advocacy groups. The journalists saw the woman going inside. The paper never published her story, but did publish a video of a reporter confronting her about her motives.

The following year, the Post won a Pulitzer for its coverage of Moore. The citation praised the paper for “purposeful and relentless reporting that changed the course of a Senate race in Alabama by revealing a candidate’s alleged past sexual harassment of teenage girls and subsequent efforts to undermine the journalism that exposed it.”

Journalists in the US and elsewhere have debated other philosophies that can be seen as questioning the balance they should strike between helping people and telling them the truth. These have included the approach often known as “solutions journalism”; the idea that the news should inspire hope; and the notion of journalistic “impact.” These concepts are not monolithic, nor intrinsically linked. But considering them in tandem can be instructive for how we might usefully think about stretching the boundaries of journalism, and how we might not.

The Solutions Journalism Network, a US-founded group that is a leading advocate of solutions journalism, has described its approach as “a global shift in how people understand and shape the world by focusing reporting on responses to problems and what we can learn from their successes and failures,” rather than merely focusing on the problems. “When news reveals what’s working (or promising),” the SJN has argued, it “elevates the tone of public discourse, making it less divisive and more constructive, allows communities to see better options, and builds agency and hope.”

If problems are a part of the world that journalists must cover, solutions to those problems are often part of it, too. Sometimes, reframing a story around potential solutions can change the way that something is discussed in society—with concrete, positive consequences. Road safety is one such subject. News organizations all over the world have often blamed car crashes on individual drivers or victims, but in recent years, more journalists, prompted by the World Health Organization and other groups, have sought to incorporate structural explanations, such as vehicle and road design, into their coverage. This in turn has changed how some members of society and policymakers have thought about preventing road deaths. Matts-Åke Belin, a WHO official, told me in a 2023 interview for CJR that journalists in Sweden helped pressure the government to install new safety barriers that have proven highly effective.

The SJN and other advocates for solutions journalism have stressed that the point of the approach isn’t to be Pollyannaish. Coverage of solutions, they say, should supplement, rather than replace, coverage of social problems. And the reporting should be evidence-driven: if a particular solution isn’t working, journalists shouldn’t hide that fact. Still, some of the rhetoric around solutions journalism can border on the evangelical. (One of the founders of the SJN has spoken of changing “the moral imagination of the world.”) As I see it, journalists should be deeply humble and skeptical about proposed solutions to social problems, particularly those that have proven intractable.

And journalists should always interrogate which solutions policymakers consider “credible” or “achievable” and which they don’t. “Legacy newsrooms have made more efforts to include solutions in their coverage, which I think is to be welcomed. Whether they always present the full range of solutions, and not just the politically possible solutions, is another question,” Bartholomew told me. In the modern age, “society has been remade in huge, dramatic ways and can be remade again. But you’re unlikely to read that in much solutions journalism.”

Solutions to big problems, of course, can be simple on a technical level, but hard to implement due to a lack of political will—or worse, corrupt interests strangling the political process to preserve the status quo. “It’s almost farcical how easy the solution is for a lot of the stuff that I [cover],” my UK newspaper journalist acquaintance told me. Often, it boils down to “don’t do this shit.”

Solutions journalism has been name-checked as an antidote to perceived excessive negativity of the news media. According to many critics, major news organizations have a bias toward covering things that are wrong with the world; as a result, these critics say, many news consumers feel overwhelmed and tune out. As Bartholomew reported for CJR in 2023, a number of initiatives have popped up (including at major news organizations) that aim to tell more positive stories. Some—like Reasons to be Cheerful, an online magazine founded by the musician David Byrne—start from the premise that excessive negativity produces a skewed, inaccurate view of the world. Others offer something more like escapism. The founder of one project described negative news as “junk food” when everyone needs a balanced diet.

As with solutions journalism, there is some merit to attempts to balance out negative news. Journalists shouldn’t present a gratuitously negative view of the world, because doing so can distort the truth; indeed, journalists shouldn’t present a view of the world that is gratuitous in any respect. Even in dark times, the world is full of hopeful stories that merit journalists’ attention, because they’re important or delightful or simply fun. There’s nothing to say that such stories can’t be in the public interest.

But here, too, I see caveats. First, even if journalists do promote a negative view of the world, many news consumers appear to be drawn to it. A 2019 study found that “all around the world, the average human is more physiologically activated by negative than by positive news stories” (even if there is “a great deal of variation across individuals” and news producers “should not underestimate the audience for positive news content”). Other studies have suggested something similar. Somewhat counterintuitively, a 2024 survey out of Austria found that many people who said they avoided the news because they found it unduly negative still consumed a lot of it. Other researchers have found that self-professed news avoiders still encounter a lot of news indirectly, on social media or via family members.

While we should all desire a citizenry that is aware of and engaged with the news, society doesn’t require its members to mainline information 24-7. Despite the financial decline of the media industry and creeping threats to press freedom, news today is extraordinarily abundant, or at least available, in much of the world, a reality that is itself overwhelming. People choosing to dip in and out of the news isn’t necessarily a problem. I sometimes choose to tune out the news—and I’m a journalist.

Given this abundance, journalists generally can’t dictate which news people consume, or when or how. This has always been the case, but in the internet age, news has been radically disaggregated; many people no longer subscribe to a newspaper, with its editorially curated mix of articles, but consume individual stories from diverse sources that come their way via a Web search or social media platform, steered by algorithms that often amplify the reach of angry or inflammatory content. People consume information in ways that are “probably not as guided and purposeful” as journalists might imagine, Jack Shafer, the veteran media critic, told me. Instead, he argued, people read the way they might eat from a smorgasbord.

In this environment, forcing a particular diet on news consumers—Eat less junk food!—is impossible, or close to it. There may be no clearer demonstration of this than the way in which the internet has collapsed the distance between news consumers and things going on far away. As Max Fisher put it in the Times in 2022, the world today is, by many statistical measures, better off than in the past, but “with news consumption far greater than it once was, even those who live far from crises now live in a digital world of constant, dire updates.” (In reality, that may have less to do with the actions of journalists than technological progress.)

Both solutions journalism and the desire for positive news are concerned, at least to some extent, with the notion of journalistic impact: the idea that journalists shouldn’t think of their work in a vacuum but should consider how it might imprint the world. Journalism is often deemed valuable if it leads to some form of real-world accountability: a politician resigning, a flawed policy being changed, a family being reunited. Impact, in this sense, can guide which journalists get funding for their work, and who wins awards.

Sometimes, journalism does have an obvious, immediate impact. That can be gratifying. But readers of, and donors to, journalism should keep in mind that impact can be harder to measure than, say, a president resigning in disgrace. “Nine times out of ten, you don’t immediately succeed in changing anything,” the UK newspaper journalist told me—but that doesn’t mean that the nine stories are worth less than the tenth. “Putting stuff on the public record is really valuable,” this journalist said. “Even if you don’t immediately change everything, you can create that narrative that starts to change things.” Impact can be cumulative.

If journalists can’t dictate how people consume their work, nor can they control its consequences. Plenty of worthwhile journalism has no impact at all, immediate or otherwise. That may be more true now than ever. Politicians the world over seem to have learned that the most effective response to scandal isn’t to change course or resign, but to cry “fake news!” and double down. As the British dramatist David Hare, who has explored this theme in his work, once put it, “disgrace is no longer a real thing for politicians; they just brazen everything out.”

Ultimately, when solutions journalism or good news journalism or impactful journalism is done well, these qualifiers become unnecessary—it’s just good journalism, showcasing sound judgment as to what’s true and important about the world. Rethinking journalism about car crashes to account for structural factors like vehicle and road design, for example, isn’t only desirable for its potentially lifesaving outcomes, but because it tells a truer story as to what causes crashes than lazily blaming the driver or the victim.

The world we inhabit is the result of a chain of decisions, none of them inevitable. Journalism can help inform those decisions and how people think about them. Again, though, journalists can’t control those decisions—just as they cannot mandate certain solutions or make the world a happier place or impose themselves on a certain politician or process. Yoking the purpose of journalism to its outcomes thus strikes me as problematic, especially when journalism has sources of social value that are squarely within journalists’ gift.

Journalism should be relentlessly critical. Here, I am referring to “criticism” not as negative feedback but as a process of thought or analysis; the act of evaluating, probing, or teasing out an idea. “They wholly mistake the nature of criticism who think its business is principally to find fault,” John Dryden, the seventeenth-century English poet, once wrote. “Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.” Dryden was talking about literary criticism. But his words also apply to the daily process of thinking about the world around us.

Again, solutions journalism and good-news journalism are often critical, in this sense. And criticism should never tip over into cynicism—a poor cousin of the concept that, I would argue, is not a form of critical thinking at all since it involves reflexive negative assumptions. Still, it is a fundamental purpose of journalism to constantly ask questions of the world. A journalist’s primary job is not to celebrate the routine or expected. (Safe and uneventful car journeys are not news stories, even if the road-design principles that facilitate them might be.) Even in a well-functioning society, some institution or policy could always work better than it does. It is the job of journalism to find and interrogate these failures, and to bring them to public attention. To do so is not to nitpick or doom-monger.

Nor is it the role of journalism, in my view, to give people hope—at least not false hope. If an aspect of the world is bleak, journalists must show that truth unflinchingly. A news organization might choose to offset that with a newsletter dedicated to cute cat photos, but it is under no obligation to serve some set diet of happy and unhappy news, or to make people feel better about the latter. Journalists are not nutritionists or counselors.

Critical thought should infuse every type of journalism. This does not mean that every piece of journalism must serve up explicit, deeply probing analysis. Some types of journalism—wire copy produced by news agencies, for example—are useful because they quickly and economically present raw facts. Even these types of journalism, though, should be the product of a critical mind; journalists producing this content must question the veracity and relevance of the facts they are communicating and choose the best words to express them. At the opposite end of the spectrum, opinion journalism, too, should be a critical exercise—even if its intention is, ultimately, to win the reader over to a particular way of thinking.

Sometimes, a journalist might choose, quite justifiably, not to report on a problem that they have uncovered. On occasion, the stakes of such a decision might even be life or death; if disseminating information about a secret national-security matter, for example, could lead to disastrous consequences, then journalists should of course think twice. But the choice to withhold information itself calls for rigorous critical thought. A national-security scenario, for instance, requires weighing the risk and likelihood of disaster against the social benefits of disclosure and evaluating the honesty of official entreaties to keep the information secret. As history has shown, such entreaties are not always to be trusted.

Last year, I served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes in the “Criticism” category. I was working on the book from which this essay has been adapted at the time, and had thus been thinking a lot about the role of criticism in journalism, in the expansive sense outlined here. But the Pulitzer entries I was tasked with judging tended to be narrower in focus. Mostly, they were concerned with the assessment of artistic and aesthetic merit in film, TV, art, architecture, music, and other cultural products.

This type of work is important: culture adds richness to all our lives and is itself a source of power. But there are fears that cultural criticism is fading. As traditional local news organizations have withered, they have cut staff whose full-time job it was to critique the local artistic scene. Early last year, it was reported that Pitchfork, a beloved US music publication, would be folded into a (very different) brand under the same corporate parent, and lay off much of its staff.

The sense of loss here is not merely economic. In the past, “people didn’t just want to talk about music, they wanted to talk about it as though it was art and also about what it said about us as a society, as Americans, as a culture,” the journalist Israel Daramola told my CJR colleague Feven Merid following the Pitchfork cuts. “That way of looking at music is just completely gone, even by the people who still care enough to write about it.” Others have argued that the music journalists who are left increasingly pay lip service to major corporate artists with energized fan bases, such as Taylor Swift. Such coverage, Hannah Williams wrote in the New Statesman, is “a disservice to journalist, audience and artist alike, a Faustian bargain that leaves us only with smooth-pored photo shoots and printed hagiographies—fools of the court competing for the attention of their queen.”

At least in some corners of the media industry, deeply probing cultural criticism remains alive and well. (I had to read a lot of it while serving as a Pulitzer juror. The award ultimately went to Justin Chang, an outstanding film critic who had just moved to The New Yorker from the Los Angeles Times, another local paper that was making deep cuts at the time.) Other subgenres of journalism that engage with the world in specific, yet highly critical, ways persist, too.

Satire is one such form. If the concept of journalism has fuzzy boundaries, satire sits somewhere near the edge of them; good comedy, after all, often relies on distortion and exaggeration—hardly desirable journalistic traits. But satirists sometimes do work that is clearly journalistic, or appears to be. One good example is the US-based British comedian John Oliver, whose show has conducted hard-hitting investigative journalism even if Oliver has rejected that label. (“If you make jokes about animals, that does not make you a zoologist,” he said in 2014. “We certainly hold ourselves to a high standard and fact-check everything, but the correct term for what we do is ‘comedy.’”)

There is a long history of news products using comedy to skewer the proclivities and hypocrisies of the powerful. The press of seventeenth-century England served up both cartoons and scurrilous ballads (known as “libels”) that were sung and even posted in public places; one eighteenth-century publication circumvented a ban on reporting parliamentary proceedings by dressing its work as satirical dispatches from the fictional nation of Lilliput. Today, some British newspapers still employ sketch writers whose job it is to relate political news while lampooning those making it—a task of “human analysis,” as Quentin Letts, one of its practitioners, told me, that involves drilling into politicians’ vanity, pomposity, failure, or dullness.

It’s important to note here, of course, that satire has not always been used to look critically at the wider world—at least not in a way that any journalist should recognize. In the post–Civil War era in the US, the News & Observer, a newspaper in North Carolina, hired a cartoonist to draw racist depictions of Black people as a means of whipping up fear and hate—playing into a broader white-supremacist conspiracy that culminated in a municipal coup and a massacre of Black residents. As the cartoonist Matt Bors pointed out to me, cartoons can still proffer misinformation or send a message that seeks to reinforce, rather than interrogate, the status quo.

Another subgenre of journalism—one with which I am especially familiar thanks to my work at CJR—is media criticism, the decidedly meta practice of journalists turning a critical spotlight on the work of their peers. In my experience, some journalists tend to accept media criticism as a valuable check on their profession, whereas others find the idea alien, insisting that they are not the story. A media critic though I may be, I see the practice as vital: journalists are themselves powerful actors, at least in shaping how citizens see the world (something that continues to be true even in this age of loud protestations of journalistic powerlessness). They also work within a powerful industry—one that may be in decline financially, but still involves mega-rich businesspeople, workplace abuses, and its share of zany characters.

Indeed, media criticism is far more than just a subgenre of journalism—it is a practice that everyone in society, from top politicians on down, can engage in. This has maybe always been the case. When early printed news hit London in the seventeenth century, discerning readers “compared reports, probing for inconsistencies and gaps in logic,” as Jonathan Healey, a historian at Oxford University, wrote in The Blazing World, his 2023 history of revolutionary England. Sometimes, people criticize the media in abjectly bad faith; politicians often do so when they don’t like a negative story or want to use journalists as a campaign punching bag. Journalists certainly should not pander to their critics. But the act of media criticism itself is to be celebrated, not scorned. If journalists should think critically about the world around them, then those inhabiting that world have a right, and perhaps a duty, to think critically about how journalists do that job.

We live in an age of deep concern about declining public trust in the media. This is, indeed, a big problem: people have access to more information than ever before, but also more misinformation, and many politicians—not to mention charlatans and grifters within the media industry—would happily lead them to the latter. It is not a problem I claim to know how to solve. But I would argue that no one should trust “the media” as a whole—that category is too multitudinous to deserve blind faith—or even any one outlet in its entirety. Encouraging consumers to assess the news they are being fed—to check it, compare it, probe it for inconsistencies and gaps in logic—might lead them to doubt things that are true. But the alternative—ordering them not to think about it at all—is the hallmark of tyrants, not to mention liable to backfire.

As Michael Schudson, a scholar at the Columbia Journalism School, once put it, “Everyone in a democracy is a certified media critic, which is as it should be” (even if, in his view, “most criticism misfires”). Not that media criticism is the preserve of democracies alone. Early last year, I spoke with Toe Zaw Latt, a senior journalist at Mizzima, a major news organization from Myanmar, where a burgeoning free press was crushed by a military coup in 2021. I asked him how Myanmar’s journalists, many of whom have since been forced into exile, were thinking about balancing critical scrutiny of all political actors while also fighting for democracy, an objective shared by a range of armed groups opposed to the country’s ruling junta. People in Myanmar, he replied, grew up consuming propaganda. “They know it very well,” he said. “You can’t lie to your audience. If you lose your credibility from the audience, you’ll be dead.”

Martin J. Dooley, the bartender who described journalism as comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, wasn’t a real person, of course, but a fictional commentator dreamed up by Finley Peter Dunne, a real-life journalist and writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who often used the Dooley character to make critical points about society in a satirical way. When he had Dooley coin the phrase, he didn’t mean it as a positive thing—he was actually mocking journalists for being busybodies. “The newspaper does everything for us,” Dooley said, sardonically (and in thick Irish American dialect that I haven’t reproduced here). “It runs the police force and the banks, commands the military, controls the legislature, baptizes the young, marries the foolish, comforts the afflicted, afflicts the comfortable, buries the dead and roasts them afterward.”

These days, some members of the public, especially in the US, seem to want journalists to do an awful lot for them—if not to bury the dead or roast them afterward. As Victor Pickard, of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has put it, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 caused many people to see “news institutions as the last bulwark of civil society, protecting them against everything from fake news to fascism.” Depending on who you ask, journalists are crusading muckrakers who bring down presidents, or vaccinators against the rampant spread of online disinformation, or hands-on service providers in their communities, or all of the above, or something else entirely. Many journalists seem to view their work as a noble calling to make a dysfunctional world a better place. To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, perhaps.

And yet, collectively, we have fewer resources than in the past with which to do all this, as the news industry continues its precipitous financial decline. Ultimately, society most needs journalism to fulfill its core roles of judging what is true and adopting a constantly critical posture. These roles are demanding enough without adding a duty to save the world. This is absolutely not an endorsement of journalistic detachment and amorality, of the idea that journalists must stand to one side and document injustices with a shrug. But, at least much of the time, enacting substantive change is out of journalists’ control. To judge journalists by such standards is to set them up to fail. 

This is not to say that journalists don’t routinely make the world better. But they do so in subtler ways than those of the caped crusader. Journalists can improve the world around them simply by performing their core roles consistently and well. They might change the life of one person within it, by making them feel seen, heard, or valued—or, conversely, shamed, attacked, or belittled. None of these are small things. They are powers to be wielded responsibly.

Nonetheless, as Walter Lippmann put it more than a hundred years ago, “the press is no substitute for institutions.” The news media, he wrote, “is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision,” but “men cannot do the work of the world in this light alone.” His words resonate with me today, at a time when so many of our institutions are in poor shape, and there seems to be a growing desperation as to what we, as journalists, might be able to do to fix them. This feeling isn’t morally wrong or incompatible with journalism. Our core job, however, is not to plug the gaps left by institutions, but to be a searchlight—restlessly moving, probing, illuminating. Criticizing.

This essay has been adapted from What Is Journalism For?, a new book by Jon Allsop, the author of CJR’s newsletter, The Media Today. It is out April 8, published by Bristol University Press. You can find more information about the book here. Jon will be in conversation about the book with Joel Simon, the founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and a regular CJR contributor, at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, on Saturday, April 12, at 12:35pm local time. More information about the event, which will also be available online, is here.

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