The 21st century has already seen dramatic changes affecting both journalism and politics. The rise of a range of new digital and networked communication technologies combined with the stagnation and decline of many traditional mass media has had a profound impact on political journalism. The arrival of new digital media has affected the ways in which political actors communicate with the public, with or without journalists as intermediaries. Newspapers that once held political leaders to account are now struggling to survive; broadcasters that once gathered whole nations for the evening news are now fighting for relevance faced with innumerable new competitors on cable and digital television; online-only media, such as blogs and social networking sites, are changing how we communicate about politics. News media remain central to political processes, but the ways in which journalists and politicians interact are changing. This book examines how and provides a comprehensive and comparative analysis of the state of political journalism in Western Europe today, including the many challenges facing journalists in this important period of transition.

Raymond Kuhn is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary, University of London, where he has been a teacher and researcher for over thirty years. He has twice been Head of the Department of Politics (1992-96 and 2004-08) and was also Dean of the Faculty of Arts (1996-99). Raymond completed a joint honours degree in French and Politics at the University of Glasgow, followed by a PhD in Politics at the University of Warwick. He spent part of both his undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes in France, first as an assistant teacher in Orléans and later as a research student in Paris.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is associate professor of communications at Roskilde University (RUC) in Denmark and (part-time) Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford in the UK, where I was based 2010-2012. Before that, he did his PhD in Communications at Columbia University, working at the Graduate School of Journalism and teaching at the School of International and Public Affairs.