About the Book

The front pages of newspapers reveal a shift over the past few years: stories are more personal, more inclusive, less distant from readers’ experience. Journalist Michele Weldon takes a fresh look at how newspapers have carved out a narrative niche that reflects society’s fascination with personal stories and readers’ demands for diversity in content. Comparing 160 front pages in 20 American newspapers for eight dates in 2001 and 2004, she shows a shift toward features over hard news, along with an increase in anecdotal or humanistic approaches to all stories. Forces such as blogs, citizen journalism, newsroom diversity, and other factors have converged to remake the front page, and Weldon unveils the content of everyman news as commodity apart from the mode of delivery. She also incorporates more than fifty interviews with people connected to journalism about what these changes mean.

Once called the first draft of history, news has become more of an anecdotal companion to history as newspapers have shifted to become “story papers.” The evidence is telling: stories now use more unofficial sources than ever before; the inverted pyramid form of news writing is rarely practiced; and especially after 9/11, news has become more humanized.

Scanning the crowded media landscape, Weldon—a journalist for more than 25 years— weaves interviews with insight, observation and hard data to help explain how and why newspapers have changed so drastically so quickly. Everyman News offers a provocative look at why American newspapers have changed direction with their content, style and sourcing saying as much about our culture as they do about the journalists who write them and the consumers who read them.

Is Everyman News perhaps right for its time, or is merely a symptom of what Weldon calls “Chicken Little journalism”? Weighing in on such natters as narrative therapy and the evangelism of  narrative journalists, she invites readers to make their own calls in this original and important contribution to the study of media. Everyman News is a  book that will contribute to our understanding of newspapers in the new century. This is must reading for professionals and an eye-opener for anyone trying to comprehend the significant shifts in today’s front pages.