Free for All : The Internet's Transformation of Journalism

Information wants to be free, some argue, and the availability of news online democratizes news. Others point to the mainstream media's financial struggles and failures and see a bleak future for the Fourth Estate. In Free for All, longtime scholar of digital media Elliot King intertwines the development of computing as a communications platform with the history of the efforts to use this technology for journalism.

Elliot King, a veteran technology reporter, has been on the cutting edge of communication technology since he established his first e-mail account in 1984. He is a professor of communication at Loyola University, Maryland, founder of his school's digital media lab, coauthor of The Online Journa@list (2001), and special editor of three volumes of the Electronic Journal of Communication, about journalism and the Internet. A longtime print and online journalist, Jeff Jarvis is an associate professor and the director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York's new Graduate School of Journalism. He is author of What Would Google Do? (2009) and blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com. He is consulting editor and partner at Daylife, a news start-up, and a new media columnist for The Guardian and host of its Media Talk USA podcast.