“The future of the book is the blurb,” as McLuhan once said. The news teaser, not even the article, is now the quantum of media content. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” (2020). What is the unit… Read More ›
Media ecology
Scheduling the extinction of newspapers
Newspapers are in decline because of economic and technological factors, but their life span is measured by demographic factors. They will exist as an industrial product for no longer than the mid-2030s. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of… Read More ›
Ownership of the media: it is not what you think it must be
Traditional media owners may still control the news media, but they no longer control the news. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” (2020). Under the idea of ownership as a filter of the Propaganda model, Herman and… Read More ›
Membership as a new business model and the failure of “The Correspondent”
The news has broken that the Correspondent (De Correspondent’s English-language site), is shutting down on December 31.[1] The case of The/De Correspondent was the biggest, after the Guardian, example of the membership model. And while the surrogates of membership that… Read More ›
Negativity bias takes the lead when news is paid by readers, not advertisers
Bad news plus good crowd makes good engagement. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” (2020). A teaser on the main page of the New York Times’ website on May 14, 2020 read: Almost 3 million U.S. workers… Read More ›
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. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” (2020). On November 15, 2011, soon after midnight, the… Read More ›
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 ›
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. A… Read More ›
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 ›
Sourcing: news supply in the media. The switch from news to opinions and from bureaucrats to “experts”
Herman and Chomsky thought that government and corporate bureaucracies subsidized the media by supplying news, as it was rather expensive to have correspondents everywhere. And they were right. But now it costs almost nothing to get evidence from wherever you… Read More ›
