The documentary has achieved rising popularity over the past two decades thanks to streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Despite this, documentary studies still tends to favor works that appeal primarily to specialists and scholars.

AcknowledgmentsPart I: Popular Documentary Today1. Pop Docs: The Work of Popular Documentary in the Age of Alternate Facts, by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson2. Reclaiming the Popular for Public Interest Documentary, by Ezra WintonPart II: Documentary Ecologies3. Public Television's Role in the U.S. Documentary Ecology, by Patricia Aufderheide4. On (Not) Falling from the Sky: Fly-Over Global Documentary as Capitalist Body Genre, by Zoë Druick5. Accelerating Deceleration: Slow Violence and Time-Lapse Cinematography, by Devon CouttsPart III: Short Forms and Web Practices6. From Elegy to Kitsch: Spectacles of Epistephelia in Food, Inc. and Early Food Documentaries, by Sabiha Ahmad Khan7. Errol Morris, The New York Times, Docmedia, and Op-Docs as Pop Docs, by Anthony Kinik8. Popular Music & Short Form Nonfiction: Is the Web a Forum for Documentary Innovation?, by Michael Brendan BakerPart IV: Auteurs, Politics and Popularity9. From the Essay Film to the Video Essay: Between the Critical and the Popular, by Allison de Fren10. Errol Morris and the Ends of Irony, by Jonathan Kahana11. Vérite: Lauren Greenfield and the Challenge of Feminist Documentary, by Shilyh WarrenPart V: Documentary Genres12. Citizenfour and the Anti-Representational Turn: Aesthetics of Failure in the Information Age, by S. Topiary Landberg13. Of Kids and Sharks: Victims, Heroes and the Politics of Melodrama in Popular Documentary, by Christie Milliken14. Strategies of the Popular Music Documentary's Recovery Mode, by Landon PalmerPart VI: Engaging Audiences15. Assembling Nanking: Archival Filmmaking in the Popular Historical Documentary, by Dylan Nelson16. Virality is Virility: Viral Media, Popularity and Violence, by Alexandra Juhasz17. Populism, Participation and Perpetual Incompletion: Performing an Urban History Commons, by Rick Prelinger18. The Armchair Juror: Audience Engagement in True Crime Documentaries, by George S. Larke-Walsh19. New (Old) Ontologies of Documentary, by Steve F. AndersonIndex