Three Books about the Future of Journalism

Todd Oppenheimer has a great article on this topic in today's San Francisco Chronicle.  From the intro:

This dilemma  --  the slow death, seemingly by suicide, of a cultural grandfather and its precarious replacement by an energetic, out-of-control adolescent  --  is the subject of three timely new books: American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media by Neil Henry (University of California Press; 326 pages; $24.95), We're All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age by Scott Gant (Free Press; 240 pages; $26) and The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen (228 pages; Doubleday; $22.95).

Together, these books raise vital questions  --  and ignore others that are just as central. Coincidentally, each book squats on a different corner of the ideological triangle that has defined the debate over the future of news. Keen takes one side, angrily lambasting today's online "citizen journalists"; Gant takes the opposite corner, extolling these amateurs; and Henry takes the middle corner floating gracefully above the  two others, and not just because he has staked out the middle ground. In "American Carnival," by far the most reasoned and well documented of these works, Henry struggles earnestly to reconcile the fiery viewpoints Gant and Keen represent, along with the many other impatient forces in today's media revolution.

Link: Read all about it -- but where exactly? Three books consider the current state of journalism and its future in a landscape dominated by the Internet.