What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism | By Jack Fuller | University of Chicago Press | 224 pages, $25

Jack Fuller is a veteran of almost four decades in journalism. He reported from Washington and Vietnam. He wrote editorials for the Chicago Tribune, some of which won him a Pulitzer Prize. He spent four years as the Tribune’s editor and publisher, and twelve more running the Tribune Publishing Company, one of the nation’s biggest. He is onto the biggest story of his life: why the news is in crisis.

In What Is Happening to News, Fuller wants to go beyond—far beyond—recounting the evident facts that advertising has deserted the tree-based, inflammable papers and that their publishers don’t know how to make money online. He wants to drill down, way down, into the territory of philosophers, historians, engineers, and more than anyone else, neuroscientists, to ask why the papers don’t appeal to readers—particularly to the young whose parents were readers.

Fuller reminds us, quite rightly, that news competes for people’s attention with uncountable zillions of alternatives. He wants to take account not only of what news organizations are doing wrong, but of what’s dysfunctional about the link between these organizations and their customers. So he starts by identifying “four separate forces that came together at the close of the twentieth century to reshape the way people take in news.” There is, first of all, popular suspicion of experts who claim to be objective. There is, second, the even deeper suspicion of whether it is possible to know anything about the world. There is, third, the emergence of information technology that “presented the human mind with unprecedented cognitive and attention challenges.”

But the force that most deeply engages the author—the one that absorbs the plurality of his pages—predates modernist skepticism, postmodernist cynicism, and Craigslist by hundreds of thousands of years. It traces back, he insists, to “Homo sapiens’ prehistoric origins on the African savannah.” What Fuller is talking about is the fact that human beings are simultaneously emotional as well as rational creatures. Thanks to natural selection, our brains are hard-wired to pay attention to novelty, especially the kind that can kill us. (Alert! Tiger ahead!) From such observations, our synapses congeal into patterns—whenever you see a moving orange-and-black blur, think Tiger!—which may save our lives but also dispose us toward prejudices, systematic cognitive errors. Moreover, the more information flies at our brains, the more we are aroused by emotions, including emotions triggered by the sheer energy it takes to navigate through a torrent of information. The more aroused we are by emotions, the more emotions it takes to drive our attention. Meanwhile, the brain gets skewed by all these efforts and the emotions they generate.

Consider the previous paragraph a set of factual dots that Fuller is trying to connect to a second set of dots, as follows: Distracted Americans are turning away from dead-tree newspapers in droves. They are now in possession of electronic devices that are better at gaining attention than newspapers. Accordingly, advertisers’ interest in spending lots of money to try to attract their attention through newspapers is declining. In the words of the Pew Research Center, “Newspapers, including online, saw ad revenue fall 26% during [2009], which brings the total loss over the last three years to 43%.”

More dots: Some news organizations are going out of business, but more are cutting costs by reducing capacity to report news. Newspapers overall have cut roughly 30 percent of their reporting and editorial payrolls since 2000. TV broadcasters have slashed core staffs as well. The more the news organization tries to cope with the loss of readers and viewers by holding on to its traditional means of making itself useful—namely, striving to cover the world objectively, as it is, not as anyone wants it to be—the more it loses readers and viewers. The only news sector that’s holding its own is cable TV, which happens to be the most opinionated.

Todd Gitlin , who teaches journalism at Columbia, is the author of a new book, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street.