An overview of the ways modern communication technologies and information approaches interact with human cognition to make it difficult for people to effectively find and interpret information and what journalists can do about it.

The central argument of this book is that journalists and audiences can no longer afford to pretend that all information is competing on an even playing field and that it is enough for journalists to simply publish “the facts.” Effective Journalism attempts to explain the reality, rather than the ideal, of how people seek and process information, and what journalists and their audiences can do to try to create an informed public in the face of that reality.