Jill Abramson: Merchants of Truth - News and Information in the Digital Age

Show #233 | Guest: Jill Abramson | Show Summary: One of the news media's most qualified voices examines critical information battlegrounds: old media vs. new, documented veracity vs. clickbait.     Jill Abramson follows four companies—The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and VICE— over a decade of disruption and radical adjustment in her new book, Merchants of Truth. The two venerable newspapers wrestle the challenge of an aging readership; the two upstarts confront a ballooning but fickle audience of millennials.     She profiles the defenders of the legacy presses and the larger-than-life characters behind the new speed-driven media competitors. Those players include Jeff Bezos and Marty Baron, Arthur Sulzberger and Dean Baquet, Jonah Peretti, and Shane Smith as well as their reporters and anxious readers.     What does all this portend for the discriminating reader?