Author Archives
Media futurologist
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Negativity bias takes the lead when news is paid by readers, not advertisers
Bad news plus good crowd makes a good engagement. A teaser on the main page of the New York Times’ website on May 14, 2020 read: Almost 3 million U.S. workers filed for unemployment last week. Although the weekly tally… Read More ›
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The news media: watchdogs prefer the paywalled garden
“What happens when journalism is everywhere?”, Mathew Ingram asked in 2011. Nine years and one Trump term later, the answer is here. On November 15, 2011, soon after midnight, the New York riot police started a raid to evict the… Read More ›
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Journalism in search of a cute little monkey
Having lost their traditional business to the internet, the news media are forced to sell ‘something else’. But selling something else, not content or ads, makes them sellers of something else, not the news media. Years ago, resort photographers had… Read More ›
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Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers on Podcast “Worker & Parasite”
On the podcast this week, Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers: The Media After Trump by Andrey Mir. Next time: Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann and Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid,… Read More ›
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Postjournalism: from the world-as-it-is to the world-as-it-should-be
By the end of the 20th century, the business model of the media took its last and most optimal form: the media sold news downwards whilst simultaneously selling the audience upwards, to advertisers, creating a “supportive selling environment” (Herman) or… Read More ›
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Polarization studies are media studies
Fake news is not the principal problem in the new media environment. The impact of fake news is already mitigated by the users’ growing immunity and also by the growing noise that diminishes the potency of fake news’ impact. The… Read More ›
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The New York Times: from “We are not American Idol” to “We are not resistance” (which is gone, too).
The real symbol of the Trump bump is the New York Times. The Gray Lady made unprecedented progress during the first year of Trump’s presidency. At the beginning of the campaign, the New York Times had slightly over 1 million… Read More ›
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Paul Levinson on the power of power and advertisers over media
The US Senate vs. Twitter, or Violating the First Amendment vs. Violating the Spirit of the First Amendment. (A prominent media theorist and author of “Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium”, Paul Levinson from Fordham University in New… Read More ›
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Sourcing: news supply in the media. The switch from news to opinions and from bureaucrats to “experts”
The media cannot afford to have correspondents everywhere where something might happen. They need to rely on other networks through which important information circulates – the bureaucratic networks of government and corporations. Thus, the information supplied by the bureaucracies has… Read More ›
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Postjournalism: Discourse concentration
The polarization of stances requires the commonality of topics, in which the stances have to be polarized. In Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the deadly clash within the great Lilliput nation was caused by irreconcilable discord regarding which end of an… Read More ›
