The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism. Stuart Allen, ed. New York, NY: Routledge Publications, 2010, 642 pp.
This is an important as well as very substantial and valuable undertaking—a multi-national (and multi-author) scholarly survey of the whole academic field of journalism studies. With no fewer than fifty-six papers in seven categories, the majority written by researchers outside the United States, this is a comprehensive assessment of what we know about the fast-changing state of journalism here and abroad. Coverage is wide, indeed, such that the main section headings can only suggest the real breadth of this compilation. Documentation is thorough as well.