Professor RonNell Andersen Jones, a First Amendment law expert, has published a new book, “The Future of Press Freedom: Democracy, Law and the News in Changing Times” with Professor Sonja R. West of the University of Georgia.
“This book is the result of a year-long project I oversaw at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. We coordinated a team of more than two dozen top scholars who contributed to the volume,” Andersen Jones says.
She and West also wrote the flagship first chapter to the book, which Andersen Jones said “maps the complex terrain of problems that newsgatherers in America now face.”
Cambridge University recently announced that the book was specially selected to be the 500th book published through its Open Access program, a development that Andersen Jones called “a real honor.”
The volume includes chapters about America’s changing media landscape—analyzing technological and economic press disruptions and eroding public trust in media while also proposing legal and policy solutions.
“The American press is facing a perilous moment. A confluence of economic, cultural, technological, and political shifts has abruptly upended our longstanding sense of how the news media operates. Suddenly, it seems, these sweeping changes have realigned the traditional relationships between and among democracy, newsgathering, and press freedom, prompting new questions about what it means to value and support a free press in the United States,” Andersen Jones and West write in the book’s introduction.
While many feel tempted to abandon efforts to protect press-specific rights, the authors continue, American democracy needs press functions even as the media landscape surrounding the press evolves.
“Indeed, as both figurative and literal attacks on these roles intensify and as reliable access to shared facts dwindles, we must work even more urgently to craft legal doctrine that will identify and protect these roles in enduring ways. Rather than fixating on who is the press, our focus should be on what can be done to ensure a future for the press function,” they write.
In uniting nearly 30 U.S. legal and media studies scholars to launch this conversation about press freedom, the collective insights fall into five themes:
- Democracy and the press function
- Evolving threats to the press function
- Legal protection for the press function
- Identifying performers of the press function
- Supporting the press function
Andersen Jones’ research centers on legal issues affecting the press and the intersection between media and the courts. She particularly focuses on the role of press in American democracy and the doctrines for identifying and safeguarding press functions in a changing media and political landscape. As a former newspaper reporter and editor, Andersen Jones is also a widely cited national expert on newsgathering rights and comments frequently on free-speech dynamics in social media discourse. Her scholarly work has appeared in dozens of books and journals, and she regularly appears in national newspapers and on TV programs.
Details about an upcoming discussion on Andersen Jones’ book will be published soon.