Buy “Tales From the Great Disruption”
The Big Roundtable’s book tells the story of the narrative nonfiction revolution that began in earnest in 2011.
TALES FROM THE GREAT DISRUPTION
Insights and Lessons From Journalism’s Technological Transformation
By Michael Shapiro, Anna Hiatt, and Mike Hoyt
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ABOUT TALES FROM THE GREAT DISRUPTION
So….what just happened?
The people who fuel our civic conversation — reporters, writers, storytellers — have been asking each other that question a lot lately. So have people who consume their work. Both agree: Waves of technological change have greatly altered the news. How, exactly? Hard to say.
This much is known: What adds up to what we are calling The Great Disruption upended certainties, assumptions, and behavior in media institutions, as well as the lives of the men and women who occupied those institutions. The Disruption is changing what journalists do and thus how we think as citizens. What just happened?
Media gurus often speak with the confidence of con men. We are not them. Tales From the Great Disruption has no grand theory. Instead, it presents original reporting about what did happen when the waves of change struck and what came in their wake. The first half of the book, “The Gathering Storm,” looks back for insight while its second half, “All the Space in the World,” explores the new context.
These are stories of people and, as such they are about conflict, joy, terror, disappointment, betrayal, loss, and discovery. They illuminate a complex period still in motion. Taken together, they offer lessons on how journalism can better face its Great Disruption.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
The Eve of Destruction by Michael Shapiro
PART ONE
A Gathering Storm by Michael Shapiro
Looking for the Light
The Newspaper That Almost Seized the Future
Six Degrees of Aggregation
PART TWO
All the Space in the World by Anna Hiatt
The New Gate: Playboy‘s Dilemma
The City Section: Narratively
‘Snow Fall’ Lite: The Commercial Appeal
The Amplifiers: #Longreads and Longform.org
A New Day: Pocket
CONCLUSION
The Value of News by Michael Shapiro
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Michael Shapiro, founder of The Big Roundtable, is the author of six nonfiction books, only two of which are about baseball — The Last Good Season and Bottom of the Ninth. His work has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, The Wall Street Journal and GQ. He is a professor of journalism at Columbia University.
Anna Hiatt is the publisher of The Big Roundtable and a digital journalist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New Republic, and The New York Times, and on WNYC, among others. She’s the editor for The War Horse, a nonprofit publication dedicated to covering Post-9/11 conflict and its aftermath. She also serves as videographer and editor for a National Science Foundation-funded documentary project called The Truth About Trees. Before migrating to New York, she was a photographer with the Oakland Athletics.
Mike Hoyt is the editor of The Big Roundtable and an adjunct professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. He spent twenty-seven years at the Columbia Journalism Review, ten of them as its editor. Before that he worked for two newspapers and Business Week. He has written for several magazines and is the co-editor of Reporting Iraq: an Oral History of the War by the Journalists Who Covered It. He is a native of Kansas City, a Mets fan, and a father of three, though not in that order.
This is a Big Roundtable Book. Dedicated to discovering writers and writing, The Big Roundtable has been publishing quality nonfiction narratives since 2013. The authors of The Great Disruption — Michael Shapiro, Anna Hiatt, and Mike Hoyt — are, respectively, the site’s founder, publisher, and editor.
For press inquiries email our publisher, Anna Hiatt, at anna.m.hiatt[at]gmail[dot]com.
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