Journalism for the 21st Century:

Online Information, Electronic Databases, and the News
(NY: Praeger, 1991)

The sequel to The News as Myth, this book is about the news, the way it is written and the form it takes. It examines the relation between the content of public information and the potential affect of new technologies on the degree and type of information available in the public forum. Koch argues that new, compute-based technologies will revolutionize news and public information by fundamentally altering the relation between writer and news subject. He shows how electronic databases, by making enormous amounts of data on virtually every subject both available and accessible, have changed the equation which has defined news since at least the 1920s.

Reviews:

  1. "This is a thoughtful book, well-researched, with detailed analyses of the questions facing modern news organizations. . . Journalism for the 21st Century should become a standard text in journalism and library schools." Database, 1992. by Elizabeth Donovan, Miami Herald Research Manager.
  2. "Practical and useful, as well as academic, analytic, and historical." Preview, 1991.
  3. "Koch's book should be 'must-reading' for teachers of information gathering and public affairs reporting courses . . . additionally Koch provides the general reader with an engrossing account of how the new information technology alters the product as well as the methods of a profession." Joseph Bernt. Newspaper Research Journal, 1991.

Order Information

Available from Praeger Books, a division of Greenwood Publishing Group
Ordered through bookstores, or directly from the publisher (1-800-225-5800).

A European edition is available from Adamantine Publishing, London.

bookcover

Ethics in Everyday Places

In Ethics in Everyday Places, ethicist and geographer Tom Koch considers what happens when, as he puts it, “you do everything right but know you've done something wrong." The resulting moral stress and injury, he argues, are pervasive in modern Western society. Koch makes his argument "from the ground up," from the perspective of average persons, and through a revealing series of maps in which issues of ethics and morality are embedded.

Read More

WICN Interview

CKNW Interview

 bookcover

In Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground (University of Chicago Press, 2011) medical geographer Tom Koch makes a new, and important argument: It is in the mapping of individual cases of illness as group events that we have come to understand disease as a public thing affecting general populations. Maps become, in this telling, the workbench on which a collection of individual cases are combined to create a single health event, seen in place. It is thus in the mapping, and the environmental thinking that mapping promotes, that theories about this or that disease (and health in general) are first formulated and then tested.

New Republic Review

Haggett Review

CMAJ Published Review

Go To Tom Koch's Artist Page

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