Book Review: The News Gap: Pablo J Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein

Boczkowski and Mitchelstein's The News Gap offers an extensive insight into one of journalism and democracy's great conundrums: are the interests of the general public in line with the 'public interest'? Its aim is to investigate the preferences of news audiences - at the risk of giving away the ending, they tend to favour the 'unhealthy food' of sports, entertainment and crime over 'healthier' public-affairs content - via a large-scale empirical study of consumption at 20 online news sites in seven countries. What makes their contribution unique is that they then compare this with the story selection made by these same news outlets, offering a detailed empirical assessment of the long-assumed 'gap' between what journalists and the public deem 'newsworthy'.