3.5 stars. I am not familiar with the controversy about this book, so I will just say that Abramson does a pretty good job of managing the growing pains of the four organizations most invested in reporting with integrity (i.e., Fox and Breitbart only get mentions). I also appreciated how Abramson highlighted the work of individual reporters, particularly women.

This was a fairly interesting read, but in the wake of the plagiarism accusations, etc., I can't go more than three stars.

Great reads

For anyone interested in the transformation of journalism and the news landscape that took place from 2000 to 2020, this book is a must-read. It's a reminder not just of the societal value of traditional journalistic norms, but also of the value of books. There are thousands of articles about the "death" and future of journalism/newspapers/truth/objectivity/etc. Some of them are written from the perspective of legacy media traditionalists while others are written by digital native disrupters. All of them can only scratch the surface, not only because of their brevity but also because of their lack of an undervalued good in the information marketplace: access.

That's the greatest virtue of Merchants of Truth: the access Abramson provides to the news landscape at the start of the 21st century. As Executive Editor of The New York Times in the midst of the industry's transition to digital, she was privy to the meetings and personalities that are as much a part of the observed trends in journalism as the much-hyped technologies of the internet and social media. The writing is accessible and engaging without pandering or striving for perfectly objective detachment.

The book is divided into parts examining three phases of four news organizations: The New York Times, The Washington Post, Buzzfeed, and Vice. It's a nice balance of legacy media and disruptors, and Abramson's accounts of the organizations with which she had no direct experience are no less detailed than her account of the Times. So much writing on the social and economic trends wrought by the internet is subject to presentism and obsessions with futures and deaths of industries. By zooming out and looking at 20 years of evolutions of four entities, Abramson gives us a much richer understanding of how large organizations - old and new - adapt over time. Neither Buzzfeed nor Vice were flashes in the pan, but they didn't kill off the legacy news organizations. There is no tidy narrative here, which makes it feel more like the truth.

Where the book seems to wander furthest from the truth is when it examines the role of Facebook in the news marketplace. No doubt Facebook was as much a part of the transformation of news as any other entity, but Abramson's single chapter on its role is overheated, repeating oft-misinterpreted research on its impact and generally piling blame on the world's favorite whipping boy circa 2020, Mark Zuckerberg. In these moments, Merchants of Truth falls victim to the same biases it observers in the digital attention economy. The need to point pitchforks at the powerful often outstrips the desire to understand a complex world, regardless of whether one is writing clickbait headlines or a book.

The book is at its best when it tracks the careers of reporters and editors. Surprisingly, legacy media and disruptors have a lot in common: star reporters like Ezra Klein bounce from legacy to digital back to legacy organizations, and all struggle with remaining relevant and solvent over the long term. Journalism hasn't died and its "futures" (too complex to be predicted, at least for now) say more about our present hopes and fears than the actual future. Better to set aside the think-pieces and spend time with an experienced, intelligent, witty writer like Abramson.

I liked it a lot, and the WaPo's emphasis on driving clicks explains why they keep one certain editorial writer on staff. But it felt like we were missing a huge piece of the story by leaving out Fox News and Breitbart - while even though these outlets don't claim to be "news" or follow facts in the same way, millions of viewers/readers claim their stories are. And what do we do about that?

Despite the fact that Merchants of Truth got shredded for alleged plagiarism and factual inaccuracies, I chose to read it anyway. As a journalist, I was interested because its one of the few recent books that stepped back to survey the modern media landscape and what went wrong. And I have to say, it delivered. I enjoyed the entire thing, and I found it illuminating despite of its purported shortcomings. I thoroughly researched the issues that people had with Abramson's writing afterward, and I still don't believe they detracted from the overall book.

4.5/5

I was about three quarters of the way through this book when I learned about the accusations of plagiarism/footnote errors and inaccurate portrayals of new media figures leveled at Jill Abramson. I decided to push through, but this ratcheted up my feelings of mistrust and downgraded the quality of my reading experience. I went into it understanding Abramson’s background would color the work, but these issues moved the book from colored to compromised for me.

I worry that her overall point about the weaknesses of new media (content compromised by marketing interests, nebulous understanding of ethical reporting, lack of editorial oversight in favor of fast turn-around) were undermined by overstating the youth, inexperience, and cluelessness of the individuals profiled.

I appreciated her admission that she couldn’t objectively discuss her work and exit at the NYT. This self-awareness lent more credibility to her accounts of legacy media and their concerns.

While the “boomer hates the youngs” trope in the critical reception seems overblown, I do think her background and preconceptions led to these problems. It seems her history in a senior position in legacy media, with attendant research aids and low-level contributing reporters, may have meant she didn’t see the issue with framing a freelance journalist’s interview as an original interview in the text. She also may have overstated the primacy of style in new media to the extent that she omitted inconvenient nuances of those examples she was trying to use to illustrate her points.

super entertaining read about four major news outlets, Buzzfeed, Vice, New york times and the Wash Post. so much fun looking into the rise of Vice and its culture and different projects. I like Jeff Bezos so much better now that he is behind Washington post and is doing some resistance against the fake news thing. interesting to know that Obama administration dessimated the for-profit higher education industry, and Kaplan went under because of it, and with it washington post.

I thought I'd already written a review of this - I read it awhile ago, then discovered parts were badly sourced/plagiarized and the whole thing was a bit more unreliable narrator than I expect from my non-fiction. I heard from interviews of journalists she describes in the book that she didn't tell them they were in it, and mischaracterized them personally and the context more generally. I've also read about the misogyny and lack of support Abramson was dealing with at the NYTimes. So maybe this book got an unfair shake, but ... eh.