Jeff Jarvis, along with students and faculty at the opening of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism in New York City.

Over the past week, I’ve written about the steady stream of books written by Knight journalism and media innovation partners. Here’s the third and for the time being final batch of highlights:

·       Jeff Jarvis chronicles in Public Parts how sharing in the digital age improves the way we work and live.  Says the USA TODAY review: “Jarvis offers a persuasive and personal look at why sharing things publicly on the Web should become the norm. It makes us better and makes the Web more usable, he argues.”

Jarvis directs the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, where the nation’s first master’s degree in entrepreneurial journalism is offered.

·      James O’Shea’s “The Deal From Hell,” charges that moguls and Wall Street “plundered great American newspapers.” Rather than the internet, the forces that brought down traditional media are “lack of investment, greed, incompetence, corruption, hypocrisy and downright arrogance of people who put their interests ahead of the public’s.”  Jack Shaffer’s Washington Post review debates the point: “The problem with O’Shea’s analysis is that important newspapers whose executives and owners weren’t stingy, greedy, incompetent, corrupt, hypocritical or arrogant have also been forced to reduce news pages, cut whole sections, close bureaus and decimate newsrooms. Both The Washington Post and the New York Times, long controlled by families that have taken immense pride in providing the public service of great journalism, have bent before recent market forces and made the cuts that O’Shea deplores.”

O’Shea runs the Chicago News Cooperative, one of the many new, free, web-based nonprofit news sites Knight Foundation helped launch.

By Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at Knight Foundation