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From health care reform and global warming to marijuana legalization and same-sex marriage, voters are increasingly polarized, particularly along partisan lines. In this context, the level of fragmentation in the media landscape is assumed to be an important explanation for this polarization.

Throughout the academic year, the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center hosts a weekly Speaker Series. Over the fall 2014 semester, these events have featured a wide variety of journalists and media thinkers, from Charles M. Blow of The New York Times to Miriam Elder of BuzzFeed. The topics of conversation have ranged from the rise of citizen journalism to the need to reform the U.S. presidential election system to promote greater democracy.

The word “crisis” often comes up when talking about journalism in the U.S. and throughout the world: Dropping ad revenue, falling circulation, failed efforts to retool old models to fit a changing media landscape. As the blogosphere and Twitter rise, more opinionated kinds of media coverage push back against the longstanding ideals of impartiality and objectivity, and even the once sacrosanct authority of mainstream journalism is called into question.