Until the recent political shift pushed workers back into the media spotlight, the mainstream media had largely ignored this significant part of American society in favor of the moneyed “upscale” consumer for more than four decades. In this highly acclaimed book, Christopher R. Martin now reveals why and how the media lost sight of the American working class and the effects of it doing so.
Now, with our fractured society and news media, Martin offers the mainstream media recommendations for how to push back against right-wing media and once again embrace the working class as critical to its audience and its democratic function.
From Cornell University Press/ILR Press; Also available as an audiobook.
News, Reviews, Acclaim
New Books Network podcast, with host Tom Discenna, on No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class (51:03), Sept. 3, 2021. Also, it was chosen as “Book of the Day” for New Books Network, Sept. 3, 2021, the beginning of Labor Day weekend.
Interview segment for WNYC’s On the Media broadcast/podcast, April 16, 2021.
(Review and Symposium) Michael Hillard, Brooke Erin Duffy, Phela Townsend, Steven Greenhouse, and Christopher R. Martin, Book Review Symposium on No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class, ILR Review, 74(3), May 2021, pp. 827 –839.
“A major accomplishment...Martin’s powerful prescriptive story is very much part of the policy agenda for the broad community of labor scholars and activists.“
(Review) Rob Wells, Journalism History, February 2021.
“A detailed argument about how the demise of labor reporting speaks to something systemically troubling with U.S. journalism, a disconnect between the newsroom and the working class…this book should be read by beat reporters and editors around the country as a cautionary tale of past media failures and an inspiration to do better with the next story.”
Winner of the 2020 C.L.R. James Award from the Working Class Studies Association.
Your Rights at Work podcast, DC’s call-in show about worker rights, WPFW 89.3 FM, Aug. 13, 2020.
Heartland Labor Forum podcast, KKFI 90.1 FM, Kansas City, May 28, 2020.
Humanities on the High Plains podcast, April 13, 2020 (1:33:21).
(Review) Frank Durham, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Mar. 2, 2020.
“Well-researched and equally well-written…Martin registers a major scholarly insight.”
Nicholas Lemann, “Can Journalism Be Saved?” New York Review of Books, February 27, 2020.
“Outstanding Academic Titles, 2019,” Choice, December 2019.
“Every year in the December issue, in print and online, Choice publishes a list of Outstanding Academic Titles that were reviewed during the previous calendar year. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community…The list is quite selective: it contains approximately ten percent of some 6,000 works reviewed in Choice each year.”
Newmark Journalism School, “Hillman Foundation Launches ‘Reporting the U.S. Workplace’ at Newmark J-School,” October 7, 2019.
The reporting in No Longer Newsworthy was cited in the formation of “a unique training program for reporters aimed at improving the country’s understanding of issues around work and labor.” The book is one of the foundational texts for students of the ‘Reporting the U.S. Workplace” program sponsored by the Hillman Foundation and hosted by the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
“The Top 75 Community College Titles: September Edition,” Choice, September 26, 2019. The best of all the titles appropriate for two-year colleges reviewed in the September issue of Choice.
(Review) Choice, September 2019, vol. 57 no. 1. “This book about journalism is also an example of what journalism should be…Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.”
Carla Murphy, “Why We Need a Working-Class Media,” Dissent, Fall 2019. Co-published in the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, October 7, 2019.
(Review) Gary Roth, H-Net Reviews, JHistory, September 2019.
“His honesty as a commentator, great skills as a researcher, and deep, careful argumentation make this book worthy of considerable attention.”
Mike Elk, “Opinion: In This Economy, Every Day Should Be Labor Day,” Buzzfeed, September 2, 2019.
Mike Elk, “In the Media, Every Day Should Be Labor Day,” Payday Report, September 2, 2019.
Christopher R. Martin, “How Writing Off the Working Class Has Hurt the Mainstream Media,” Nieman Reports, August 27, 2019.
Christopher R. Martin, “America’s Invisible Working Class,” Bleeding Heartland, July 31, 2019.
Ryan Smith, “Newspapers Won’t Save Us,” Jacobin, June 6, 2019.
(Review) Timothy Francisco, Journal of Working-Class Studies 4(1), June 2019, 206-208.
“A smart, much-needed discussion of parallel forces that have led to the difficult class politics of today. His combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses mesh together extremely well, and the book reveals the ways in which the business practices of mainstream media have historically been internalized in reportage and disseminated as ‘truths’ in the public sphere.Understanding this connection is invaluable in any attempt to reconstitute a working-class politics of equity and inclusion.“
WORT, 89.9 FM, Madison, Wisconsin, Labor Radio interview, May 16, 2019 (starts 11:07).
Cornell Press 1869 Podcast: Ep. 70 with Christopher Martin, author of No Longer Newsworthy, April 18, 2019. (22:38)
(Review) Luke Savage, “The Real Working Class Is Invisible to the Media,” Jacobin, March 2019.
Steven Greenhouse, “Through the Working Class,” Columbia Journalism Review, Winter 2019.