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 ›
Media ecology
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
Advertising dominated the business of the news media, providing 70% of revenue and more. Ad revenue was so plentiful that it made media organizations the largest and richest corporations of the late capitalist period, on par with banks or oil… 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 ›
Postjournalism: Discourse concentration
The topics and discourses that do not support polarization will not circulate in the media for long or will be completely ignored. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” (2020). The polarization of stances requires the commonality of… Read More ›
Interjections and emojis: the digital reversal of literacy back to the origin of language
Radio and television returned vocal signals and gestures into communicating socially significant content. The postmodernist replacement of feelings with intensities goes hand in hand with the replacement of literacy by orality and the retribalization of culture by electronic media. A… Read More ›