Funding Journalism in the Digital Age: Business Models, Strategies, Issues and Trends. Jeff Kaye and Stephen Quinn (2010). New York: Peter Lang. pp. 185.
Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age. Michael Bugeja and Daniela V. Dimitrova (2010). Duluth, MN: Litwin Books. pp. 86.
In a dazzlingly short time, our communication and research habits have dramatically changed. Thanks to technology and the Internet, we’ve found new ways to share, store, connect, search, and inform. In so doing, we’ve damaged, outgrown, or abandoned systems that supported “old” ways—as is plainly seen in the news industry’s turmoil of the past decade. Some functions those old ways served, however, need protecting. These books address two such challenges. The difficulty of finding new economic underpinnings for the production of journalism has been the focus of heated attention. The need to be able to consistently retrieve what has been shared online has not. Both areas deserve explication, which the books’ authors ably provide.