David M. Ryfe’s work could well be the last of newsroom ethnographies as we know them. Spending months among journalists to understand their practices, their values, and their aspirations will soon not be enough to analyse the evolution of journalism in the digital public sphere. The associate professor at the University of Nevada Reno provides one of the finest and more in-depth portrayals of the struggle of newspapers to reinvent themselves, a story of failures that anticipates the slow demise of the model of journalism as mass communication. Throughout Can Journalism Survive?, the reader is presented solid evidence that compels the answer “No” to the question posed by the title. However, in the last two chapters, the author shifts the focus away from the newsrooms and explores innovative news projects to argue that the future of journalism may be in new normative definitions of the profession that embrace community participation and in organisational structures that are much smaller and less formal than traditional newspapers. There is a future for journalism, but researchers should find the answers beyond the newsroom. The vivid passages from three case studies of regional daily newspapers in the Midwest of the United States share the feeling of the end of an era. While other recent ethnographies have focused on how online newsrooms developed in the United States (Boczkowski 2004) and the rest of the world (Paterson and Domingo 2008, 2011), already highlighting the dominance of the traditional journalistic culture in the digital developments, Ryfe’s perspective is fresh and definitive at the same time. The cases have a longitudinal approach, reconstructing the evolution of specific innovation initiatives and their fates, rather than describing daily working practices. They mainly revolve around the reaction of print journalists to projects designed by new newsroom managers desperately searching for solutions to the decline in readers and advertisers of their flagship product, the print newspaper. The book is, then, an autopsy of sorts of failed innovation initiatives, which provides a bleak but fascinating insight into journalism as a profession that has historically been poorly equipped to deal with change: “[J]ournalists have little experience of imagining how journalism might be done differently” (p. 60). The chapters presenting the three cases (only one, The Cedar Rapids Gazette, is not fully anonymised) provide indisputable empirical evidence and a very solid theoretical framework to argue how what has elsewhere been appropriately labelled “industrial journalism” (Anderson, Bell, and Shirky 2012) fiercely resists change. Referring to a wide array of classics (from Bourdieu to Geertz and Searle), Ryfe proposes that the worst problem for journalism in the current scenario is not economic or technological, but rather ontological. Print journalists mostly define their profession through practice, and with the strategic changes proposed by their managers they feel lost, their professional