… But that most valuable of gifts is being hijacked, subverted/converted into a commodity, and used to mold not just consumer behavior, but society-as-a-whole. We live in an attention economy, and its media/tech ownership landscape is becomingevermoreconsoldiated.
Kyla Scanlon unpacks the way in which concentrated ownership of media and tech and their automated manipulation reshape democracy…
It’s nearly impossible not to get lost in the news right now. I was at a wedding last week, and every conversation eventually drifted back to the same subject: the World We Are in and All That is Happening. The ground feels like it’s moving faster than anyone can feasibly keep up with.
Some people think the shift is progress. Others see collapse. Either way, the line between digital and physical life is increasingly blurry. What happens online is real life. What we consume is what we become.
Plenty of thinkers have circled this before – Postman, Debord, Huxley, Orwell on media; Machiavelli, Tocqueville, Thucydides, Gibbon on human corruptibility during times of uncertainty. The convergence of endless information and a ragebait economy creates the perfect environment for splintering how we understand the world and how we understand each other.
The deeper problem is this: we no longer trust institutions to provide truth, fairness, or mobility. Once, they were scaffolding that helped us climb from raw data to wisdom. And when that scaffolding gives out, people adapt: some over-perform in the status race (because you have to) and others defect from obligations altogether (why would I work for institutions if they don’t work for me).
There are a few ways to picture our distorted information ecosystem.
The DIKW Pyramid (Data → Information → Knowledge → Wisdom): raw posts and clicks at the bottom, trending content in the middle, shared truths above that, and finally wisdom, the rare ability to see causes instead of just symptoms.
Or the Ladder of Inference: we start with data, add meaning, make assumptions – and our beliefs tend to affect what data we select. Bots and algorithms hijack that ladder, nudging us toward polarized beliefs before we realize what’s happening.
Taken together, we can combine them into what we might call a hierarchy of information:
Raw data: the endless stream of posts, likes, bot spam
Information: headlines, hashtags, trending things
Knowledge: the narratives we share and fight over.
Understanding: recognizing what might not be real (or is hyperreal)
Wisdom: systemic analysis, the ability to see causes instead of just symptoms.
Right now, we’re stuck sloshing around in the middle layers of the hierarchy: drowning in outrage, fighting over partisan hot takes, rarely reaching understanding, almost never wisdom.
Chaos always has an architect. And if we want to make sense of American democracy today, we need to understand who those architects are, and how they profit from confusion.
This polarization rests on media concentration.The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was sold as a way to increase competition in media and telecommunications, but in reality, it did quite the opposite. Within five years, four firms controlled ~85% of US telephone infrastructure. That deregulated spine carried today’s consolidation of the entire media environment – not just telephones. Newspapers. Social media. TV stations.
We have the increasing concentration of media ownership, the financialization of attention, and the transformation of information from a public good into a private commodity to be bought, sold, and manipulated…
[Scanlon characterizes and explains the concentration, examines its impacts, and unpacks the roles of bots…]
When manufacturing consensus is both cheap to produce and valuable to those who benefit from confusion, you get industrial-scale manipulation.
Truth becomes whatever can capture the most attention in the shortest amount of time. Traditional journalism, with its slow fact-checking and institutional processes, can’t compete with bot-amplified outrage. Democratic deliberation, which requires shared facts and good faith dialogue, becomes nearly impossible when the information environment is designed to maximize conflict.
We’re living in a speculation economy where perception drives value more than fundamentals. Look at the stock market: Nvidia gained $150 billion in value based the back of a $100 billion OpenAI investment (which OpenAI will use to buy more Nvidia chips). Ten companies pass hundreds of billions back and forth, and the S&P jumps like it’s measuring something real.
It’s all memes wearing suits. Meme stocks and Dogecoin at least looked like jokes; now the same speculative energy runs through the corporate core. Attention, perception, and narrative drive valuation more than production or profit.
We’ve built a world where the hierarchy of information has flipped upside down.
At the bottom, bots flood us with raw noise. In the middle, outrage and team narratives harden into “knowledge.” At the top, the ladders to wisdom like journalism, schools, civic discourse, shared institutions are weakened. The scaffolding that once helped us climb no longer holds.
The traditional solutions – fact-checking, media literacy, content moderation – assume we’re dealing with a content problem when we’re actually facing an infrastructure problem. You can’t fact-check your way out of a system designed to reward misinformation. You can’t educate your way around algorithms optimized for polarization. You can’t moderate your way past economic incentives that make confusion profitable.
Recognizing this as a market structure problem rather than an information problem changes everything. Instead of focusing on individual bad actors or specific false claims, you start thinking about the underlying systems that make manipulation both profitable and scalable.
The information wars are economic policy, determining how we allocate attention, structure incentives, and organize the flow of information that shapes every other market and political decision we make. I don’t think it’s useful to get on a Substack soapbox about this – but we need to take (1) the power of media seriously and (2) those trying to influence it extremely seriously. There is a way to get to the top of the information hierarchy! We don’t have to be stuck in these middle layers…
As we reclaim recognition, we might recall that on this date in 1452 an earlier information revolution began: Johannes Gutenberg started work on his Bible (which was completed and published in 1455). An inventor and craftsman, Gutenberg created the movable-type printing press, enabling a much faster (and cheaper) printing process. (Movable type was already in use in East Asia, but was slower and used for smaller jobs.) His Bible was his first major work, and his most impactful.
The printing press later spread across the world, leading to an information revolution– the unprecedented mass-spread of literature throughout Europe. It had a profound impact on the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Humanist movements.
Gutenberg Bible in the New York Public Library (source)
The enshittification of the major social media platforms has become impossible to ignore… and has led many to predict a more decentralized future for the web. But as William Gibson famously observed, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
Case in point: Ben Smith‘s blockbuster Semafor post on the flourishing ecology of private chat groups that has emerged, starting with…
Chatham House, a giant and raucous Signal group that forms part of the sprawling network of influential private chats that began during the fervid early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and which have fueled a new alliance of tech and the US right. That same week in Chatham House, Lonsdale and the Democratic billionaire Mark Cuban sparred over affirmative action, and Cuban and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro discussed questions of culture and work ethic.
This constellation of rolling elite political conversations revolve primarily around the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and a circle of Silicon Valley figures. None of their participants was surprised to see Trump administration officials firing off secrets and emojis on the platform last month. I did not have the good fortune to be accidentally added to one of the chats, which can be set to make messages disappear after just 30 seconds.
But their influence flows through X, Substack, and podcasts, and constitutes a kind of dark matter of American politics and media. The group chats aren’t always primarily a political space, but they are the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed. The group chats are “the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion,” wrote one of their key organizers, Sriram Krishnan, a former partner in the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (typically styled a16z) who is now the White House senior policy adviser for AI.
Of course, these are hardly the only power group chats. Anti-Trump liberals are now coordinating their responses on Signal. There are group chats for Black political elites and morning show producers. A vast and influential parallel set of tech conversations take place on WhatsApp. There’s a big China-friendly group over on WeChat. Elite podcasters have one…
… Many of the [Chatham House] chatters celebrate their success in driving the ascendant politics of the Trump era, which they hope will bring back patriotic industry and traditional cultural norms. Some who have left or lurk consider it a sinister phenomenon in which Andreessen exerted unspoken gravitational pull, as one participant put it: “You’d see that the writers were bending toward the billionaires, and even the ones who prided themselves on being iconoclastic were bending to the tastes and the centers of gravity of power.”…
… You should therefore be very suspicious of anyone who claims to be in the Genuine Ideas business but who is afraid to fully speak their mind in public. For the past half decade at least, America has been bombarded with the grumblings of influential people griping that they are not “allowed” to say what they really think, these days. Because of wokeness, and witch hunts, and things like that. What do they mean when they argue that they are not “allowed” to say something? Do they mean that they might be snatched by government agents and deported for writing a humanitarian op-ed in a student newspaper? No. What they mean, usually, is that they hold opinions that many people would find objectionable and if they say those opinions out loud people will get mad at them. In many cases, they also hold prestigious positions at media or business or academic institutions that claim to have some anodyne progressive values, and because their objectionable ideas are objectionable in the specific sense of “being some variety of bigotry,” their colleagues at those institutions would be mad at them, making their lives unpleasant. (It is darkly funny that, in the years that all of these people have been complaining about the woke censorship they are suffering, the people who have actually suffered the most professional retaliation for voicing their beliefs have been those who spoke out for the human rights of Palestinians. That has proven to be far more dangerous to one’s livelihood than being a bigot.)
It is important to notice the fact that, in truth, all of these whining people very much are allowed to say what they think. They sure can. No one is stopping them. What they are really objecting to is not censorship, but rather the honest reactions that their honest ideas will elicit. In other words, they cannot handle The Discourse. They are not equipped to participate in the Ideas industry. They are unable to carry the burden of telling the truth as they see it. This is fine, if you’re a regular person; no one is obligated to get yelled at for their beliefs. But it is not fine if you are someone—a writer, a leader, an intellectual influencer of the public—who is supposed to be pushing ideas. Those people must either say what they believe, change what they believe, or accept the fact that they are intellectual cowards.
These are the things that I thought last night when I read Ben Smith’s Semafor story about the many exclusive group chats, full of pundits and quasi-journalists and Substack writers and Silicon Valley business titans and political activists, that have served as private petri dishes of reactionary thinking since the start of the pandemic. It is a juicy story, replete with tales of the wounded signatories of the infamous Harper’s Letter forming and reforming little Signal chat groups where they could hold masturbatory agreement sessions with Marc Andreesen and Mark Cuban and similar tech gurus who fancy themselves masters of the nation’s future. Over and over again, participants in these chats explain that they were places where they could speak more openly than they would in public. “People during 2020 felt that there was a monoculture on social media,” goes one typical comment from an entrepreneur, “and if they didn’t agree with something, group chats became a safe space to debate that, share that, build consensus, feel that you’re not alone.” It’s not just the businessmen— “Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens,” agrees one popular blog thinkfluencer, who presumably is not giving his public readers his important or interesting stuff…
… Sometimes you say what you think, and guess what happens? People get mad. People yell at you. Yes. That goes with the territory. I will put the = hate mail and death threats and angry internet comments that I received during my Gawker years up against anyone’s. And, hey: that’s the fucking job. Whether you write for Gawker or Substack or the New York Times or Harper’s—or whether you are a CEO or tech visionary or a venture capitalist who goes to the Aspen Ideas festival and has a bazillion Twitter followers—the only requirement of the job is to speak your mind honestly. Because, because, by asking the public to listen to you, you are telling the public that they will be getting, as best as you can manage it, your truest ideas. We ask people to give us their attention, and their time, and in turn we give them our honest thoughts. When you are operating in this world and you stop giving people your honest thoughts, you begin ripping people off.
Feel free to hide your honest thoughts in private group chats if you like. Rather than speaking forthrightly, retreat into a little hole where you can stage manage and coordinate the rollout of soft versions of your unpopular ideas in friendly forums. But if you do, don’t pretend that you are a member in good standing of the (absurd, enraging, pompous, but ultimately socially valuable) Ideas industry. Say what you think, cowards! Or stop pretending that your beliefs are important enough for other people to care about in the first place…
… it’s worth pointing out that the dynamics of these group chats only makes sense when you keep in mind that these people are doing something literally everyone on Earth does — post in a group chat — but think they literally invented the future of media. Peak rich guy brain at work here. They, also, spent the lead up to Semafor publishing their piece freaking out about it, which hilariously hyped the shit out of it.
The interesting thing here, though — well, beyond the fact that we now have hard evidence that a secret network of the country’s richest men have been using Signal groups to coordinate a soft coup and inadvertently crashed the global economy in the process — is the timing. According to Semafor, the big digital rats nest of middle-life-crisis-havers started forming after Andreessen published the “It’s Time To Build” blog post, one of the many manifestos he would publish during his manic post-COVID era. The essay went viral on Clubhouse (lol) and led to the earliest versions of these group chats forming on, first, WhatsApp, and, then, Signal.
I was particularly vicious about Clubhouse when it launched, a site I’ve often referred to as a dinner party simulation app. And I was especially angry that the social network was being astroturfed into a “thing” by men like Andreessen. To me, Clubhouse stands as the moment Silicon Valley fully lost the plot, effusively hyping up an app that literally just let them hear their own voices. The snake finally eating its own tail. As I wrote back in 2021, “Clubhouse, by the very fact both its initial user base and its subsequent hype was basically dreamt up by Silicon Valley insiders, was, in my opinion, a test of whether or not venture capitalists had enough influence to dream up a new — honestly, very bad — social network and force it upon the rest of the internet.”
Well, it turns out Clubhouse’s hilariously fast crashout did not deter these guys from continuing to try and make fetch happen and they’ve spent the last four years coordinating behind the scenes to remake the country in their own image. Well, at least until President Donald Trump’s tariff announcement last month, which seems to have really broken the right-wing tech coalition that’s been flourishing on Signal since COVID.
And according to Semafor, these group chats did have a profound impact on how we’ve understood the world for the last four years. These groups coordinated harassment campaigns — they especially hate journalist Taylor Lorenz, apparently — and affected how narratives were shaped online and in the media.
Networked oligarchy, but, also, the most typical radicalization story you could ever tell. Men, isolated by the pandemic, found each other on a public network, Clubhouse, and moved to a dark social platform, Signal, to speak more freely and openly and then spent years radicalizing each other. This is as true for the Silicon Valley dorks as it is for QAnon as it is incels as it is for ISIS. And it’s darkly funny that some of the men who built the internet as we currently use it were not immune from the indoctrinating social pathways they funded or built. Or to put it more simply: Silicon Valley has secretly getting very high on their own supply for years.
But the ultimate takeaway is that, yes, the intellectual dark web is real. The right wing are working together closely. They are texting each other constantly and sharing resources and tactics and if we have any shot at getting ourselves out from under their thumb, we have to have the same level of coordination…
The future of the web- not so “public” (nor “civil”) discourse?
* Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language
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As we ponder pontificators, we might recall that it was on this date in 2015 that a baseball game between the Chicago White Sox and the Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards in Baltimore set the all-time low attendance mark for Major League Baseball: zero fans were in attendance for the game, as the stadium was officially closed to the public due to the 2015 Baltimore protests over police brutality to Freddie Gray.
Journalism in the U.S. is in turmoil, beset by cultural shifts, technology, economics, and politics. Today, two thoughful pieces on what its future could hold.
First, from Richard Gingras, a long (and fascinating and provocative) piece that diagnoses the situation, traces its evolution, and posits (at least approaches to) solutions. Eminently worth reading in full. Here, an excerpt especially resonant for your correspondent…
… I recently revisited the work of Robert Putnam. Putnam has researched the connection between effective governance and community engagement for five decades. He began his work in Italy, which in 1975 shifted power from the central government to the provinces. He found that the strongest corollary with effective governance was community engagement.
Basically, people in regions of ineffective governance were not joining clubs, they weren’t going on picnics or joining bowling leagues. They weren’t getting to know people who were different from them. They weren’t building a shared reality. They weren’t building social capital.
This is the result of many factors: the rise of television, increased suburbanization, the impact of technology and the Internet. The result is increased isolation, a narrowing of empathy, a reduction in common interest. Without community and real world social engagement we are not exposed to the diversity of our communities. We lose the opportunity to understand the challenges and the attributes of people who are not like us. If we don’t engage with the other, with those who are not like us, we become more vulnerable to perceiving the other from an isolated, removed, silo of fear.
Our greatest opportunity may be at the community level, by rethinking the role of a community news organization as a community platform suited to our modern digital world.
First, its explicit mission would be to strengthen the community, to both address the community’s information needs and create opportunities for engagement. In seeking to bring the diversity of a community together, it would also strive to be assiduously apolitical. Again, we inform, you decide.
Second, it would celebrate the community’s hopes and dreams, giving focus to its successes, to examples of civic empathy, as well as being the watchdog for misbehavior.
It would purposely address the community’s broad information needs — community events, local sports, the progression of life from birth to obituary. It would leverage topics of community interest that aren’t controversial. A recent mega-study coordinated by Stanford University determined the best method of addressing divisiveness is to engage the community on non-controversial subjects. This can help unify a community and build the trust necessary to address more difficult topics.
We see accountability journalism as the priority, to ferret out corruption, to expose criminal behavior. It is critical. But the audience for serious accountability journalism is small, in the low single digits. By addressing a community’s comprehensive information needs with service journalism, we can provide value to the community and gain exponentially higher engagement. This both drives the business model and increases the impact of accountability journalism by exposing it to those who might not seek it out…
Next, a piece from Patrice Schneider, the Chief Strategy Officer of Media Development Investment Fund, suggesting a funding approach that might make (more quality) journalism (more) viable. While his lens is global, the applicability to the U.S. is clear…
In the dynamic landscape of independent media funding, a three-decade-old model is gaining renewed attention among European foundations. It challenges the traditional dichotomy between grant support and market-driven investments. This innovative approach, known as the Third Way, offers a nuanced economic strategy that quantifies the intrinsic societal value of quality public interest information.
The Third Way recognizes quality information as critical infrastructure, akin to highways or electrical grids. Its value extends beyond immediate monetary returns, encompassing its capacity to sustain democratic dialogue, enable informed citizenship, and provide systemic transparency…
… The Third Way’s most profound insight is recognising the broad constituency invested in quality information:
Corporations require reliable, unbiased data for strategic decision-making.
Financial institutions depend on transparent market intelligence.
Civil society organizations need independent reporting to monitor power structures
Individual citizens seek credible narratives to navigate complex global challenges
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) fundamentally rely on access to accurate, independent information
By aligning these diverse interests, the model transcends traditional funding dichotomies; grants versus investments or market versus public funding.
And it’s not just about extracting more from philanthropy, but about creating a blended infrastructure of funding that recognises information as a shared societal resource...
(Full disclosure, both Richard and Patrice are colleagues. MDIF– originally Media Development Loan Fund– was founded by an old friend, Saša Vučinić, and your correspondent was an early investor.)
* Mahatma Gandhi
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As we nourish the news, we might spare a thought for Alistair Cooke; he died on this date in 2004. While best known ot American audiences as a television host (Omnibus, Masterpiece Theatre), he had a long career as a journalist (for the BBC, NBC, The Gaurdian, and others) and author.
After Alistair Cooke’s death the Fulbright Alistair Cooke Award in Journalism was established as a tribute to his life and career achievements. The award supports students from the United Kingdom to undertake studies in the United States, and for Americans to study in the United Kingdom.
The estimable John Battelle on yet another brick in the wall…
There’s an old maxim in the news business: Stories in which a dog bites a man are uninteresting. But a man biting a dog? Now that’s worth writing up!
Last week Google released a report on the value of news to its business. Its conclusions minced no words. Here’s the money quote: “…news content in Search has no measurable impact on ad revenue for Google.”
On first glance, Google’s experiment feels like a Dog Bites Man story – everyone knows news doesn’t drive advertising revenue – hell, I lived that truth most of my career, most recently with The Recount, which attempted to convince advertisers to support high-quality news coverage across video and social media (we couldn’t). But look a bit closer, and you might just see a Man Bites Dog story after all.
To understand why, we’ll need to go into a bit of background (those of you already deep in this story, you can skip the next few grafs.) The news business has had a tortured relationship to the tech industry for decades – first as it attempted to adapt to the Internet, then as it realized in doing so, it had been disintermediated, first by Google, and later by social media (and Apple’s iOS). The reasons for the news’ industry’s decline are too numerous to review here, but the results are clear: Overall, the sector is losing outlets, practitioners, revenue, and audience.
This has caused considerable alarm both inside the industry and within (certain) governments. The most notable of these is the European Union, which passed legislation in 2019 that mandated Google (and other intermediaries) share revenues with the news industry (the specific portion of the law that impacts Google’s revenues is Article 15, also known as “the snippet tax.”)
Google claims that when it shows a portion of a news article to its users, it’s doing both the user and the publisher a service. Publishers claim that by showing that snippet, Google subverts their business model, poaching the customer’s attention, relationship, and resultant revenue that the publisher would otherwise enjoy.
To prove otherwise, Google’s report details an experiment (PDF download) that removed all European news content from Google’s Search, Discover, and News products over a period of roughly three months. The idea was to determine whether the loss of this content had any impact on Google’s overall revenue.
The answer, as we’ve already seen, is no.
Despite being passed more than five years ago, details of how the EU legislation will be implemented in the real world are still being negotiated. Google’s report is intended to impact those negotiations with “proof” that a snippet tax is based on faulty logic. After all, how can you tax a company for stealing news revenues when, in point of fact, news creates no provable increase in samesaid company’s revenue in the first place?
This is where the story veers into “Man Bites Dog” territory. Google’s logic seems straightforward. But this argument is a classic example of a false dilemma (with a side of grading-your-own-homework tossed in for good measure).
The false dilemma is this: News has no value because news doesn’t add revenue to Google’s bottom line. To this assertion I call bullshit. Sure, Google might not make money from news. But publishers certainly do. And is news worthless to Google? Hardly.
Let’s start with the fact that Google has not one, but two major products that depend on “news.” (So does Apple, for what it’s worth). Both even call their product News! Google’s second is Discover, which for those of you who aren’t on Android phones, is the river of stories that comes up when you “swipe right” from the home screen (it’s also known as “left of home.”) Both News and Discover are massive engagement honeypots for Google (and Apple). They might not drive a ton of direct advertising revenue, but they are crucial to both companies’ overall product satisfaction. Why would either Google or Apple even build and maintain these products if “they have no value?” The answer is they wouldn’t.
If you dig into the data that came out of Google’s experiment, you can see why. While they remained constant for Search users, Daily Active Users (DAU) declined significantly – nearly 6% – for the company’s Discover product. Put another way, when Google yanked “real news” out of its Discover product, a fair number of people stopped using it. That didn’t happen with Search (down just .77%) or News – which in fact showed a significant uptick of 1.54%. Why?
Well, as a serious user of all three products, I have a pretty strong opinion. As it stands today, Discover is a crappy Instagram clone, only with more news content (Instagram and its parent Meta have spent the past few years eliminating fact-checking and down-ranking news in its feeds). The only reason I engage with Discover is for the often-pleasant surprise of a news story that is relevant to me. Take those out, and I’ll use Discover a lot less.
Google’s News product, on the other hand, is filled with mostly “quality news” stories. Take out all the European news, and what do you have left? Well, loads of content from non-EU based news publishers, as well as any engagement bait that has made it through Google’s “real news” filters.
In effect, Google “Instagram-ified” Discover when it eliminated all reputable European news, and it also “globalized” its News product (and likely added a side of clickbait). Users were likely initially confused by this, but they acted rationally: Those who went to Discover because it featured European local news started to abandon the product.
Those who went to Google News, on the other hand, found other reputable news sources (there are plenty) and probably didn’t notice the lack of local news, at least initially. They might have even enjoyed seeing stuff they usually miss, given their European identities. But one thing is certain: They went to a site dedicated to news, and they got news.
It’s hard to say exactly what happened here, because the report didn’t go into much detail. But Google did report where people went after they engaged with these two lobotomized products. The top outbound domains were, according to a footnote in the report: youtube.com, infobae.com, facebook.com, wikipedia.org, and pinterest.com. YouTube is fast replacing traditional news as an information source. Infobae is a fast-growing Spanish-language news site based in Argentina. That probably explains what happened in Spain. Facebook? Anybody’s guess what that’s all about, but since I’m writing this post, I’m going to guess Facebook’s famous engagement bait won the day there. Wikipedia is a famously trusted source of truth on the Internet. And….Pinterest?! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Pulling back, I think it’s fair to say that Google’s experiment falls somewhere between “vaguely well-intentioned” and “deeply cynical.” The company set out to prove something it already knew: It makes almost no direct revenue from news content. But it spun the resulting data into a narrative that it believes will allow the company to avoid sharing revenue with real news outlets under the EU directive.
“In other words,” Google’s report concluded, “the experiment worked as intended.”…
As we fumble the fourth estate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1881 that a celebrated hoaxster (and exploiter of the axiom “nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public”) took on partners: “P.T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Circus: The Greatest Show on Earth” joined forces with James Bailey and James Hutchinson. By 1887, the re-branded circus went by the name “The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth.”
As Josh Begley elegantly demonstrates, silence may be nigh…
The New York Times published its first issue on September 18, 1851, but the first photos wouldn’t appear on the cover until the early 1900s over 60 years later. This visual timeline by self-described data artist Josh Begley captures the storied newspaper’s approach to layout and photography by incorporating every NY Times front page ever published into a single one-minute video. The timelapse captures decades text-only front pages before the newspaper began to incorporate illustrated maps and wood engravings. The liberal usage of black and white photography begins a century later and finally the first color photo appears in 1997. What a fascinating way to view history through image, over 60,000 front pages in all…
As we ponder the prevalence of pictures, we might spare a thought for a man who made powerful– and beautiful– use of images, John James Audubon; he died on this date in 1851. An ornithologist, naturalist, and artist, Audubon documented all types of American birds with detailed illustrations depicting the birds in their natural habitats. His The Birds of America (1827–1839), in which he identified 25 new species, is considered one of the most important– and finest– ornithological works ever completed.
Book plate featuring Audubon’s print of the Greater Prairie Chicken
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