Digitizing the News (Boszkowski)

One great thing about the book is that, as Greg talked about "How to read a book in one minute", the author lays out the whole book in the first chapter: the thesis, theories, methods, main findings, and the content of each chapter. It's so explicit that I can get an idea about the whole book without going into every details of each chapter.

Although I am not familiar with the journalism profession and do not know much about American media and newspaper, this book is still interesting to me. And many points can be related to other readings and Lessig's book. The thing that I like most is that the author grasps the dynamics of this particular soical process of "appropriating new media". For example, the first main empirical finding is that "print papers have enacted a culture of innovation that led them to react to social and technical developments rather than more proactively contribute to these developments, focus on protecting the print franchise rather than on prioritizing nonprint publishing, and empasize smaller but more certain shorter-term benefits", where the readers can see one aspect of this process. Then the empirical case studies show another aspect (or aspects, more precisely) of the process. The social process in the American Dailies is like a miniature of the "information society", and the dynamics in it reflects the dynamics in the whole society.