The question this book explores – the future of press freedom – is one the United States has returned to again and again since its founding, when the framers saw fit to assign the press specific constitutional protection. What that protection means, how far it extends, the relationship between the press and the health of our democracy, and what press functions deserve the greatest degree of protection, are questions the courts and the public have debated ever since. These debates often grow most urgent at times of major upheavals in the technologies and structures of newsgathering and production, as we are now experiencing.

This book includes contributions from some of the nation’s leading thinkers on the freedoms of speech and the press. It represents a monumental effort to assess the state of the press and press freedom in the United States, and to think critically about what the press does, who the press is, and how to ensure that the key roles played by the press continue to be protected at a moment of dramatic technological change, and of deep uncertainty about the future of our democracy.

The book is the result of a year-long collaboration between the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and Professors RonNell Andersen Jones and Sonja R. West, who served as Senior Visiting Research Scholars at the Institute during the 2023–24 academic year. The collaboration also encompassed a day-long academic symposium – held in New York City on World Press Freedom Day, May 3, 2024 – which tackled the same questions addressed in these pages: Why is the press specifically protected? What is the role of a free and protected press in preserving a healthy American democracy? How do the Supreme Court’s evolving First Amendment frameworks view protections for newsgatherers and newsgathering? What are the benefits and disadvantages of being singled out in the First Amendment, and what are the benefits and disadvantages of building a more robust press function doctrine? Are new or better protections for newsgatherers and newsgathering needed for the digital age?

The many excellent contributions in this volume address these questions and illuminate promising paths forward for protecting press freedom. We are grateful to Professor Andersen Jones and Professor West for their leadership of this exciting and fruitful collaboration, to the many brilliant authors who contributed chapters to this book, and to Cambridge University Press for its work to shepherd the manuscript to publication. We feel confident that this book will galvanize support for press freedom and for reshaping legal protections to reflect the changing reality of newsgathering. That latter task could hardly be more important for our democracy.