Posts Tagged ‘news’
“Every time a newspaper dies, even a bad one, the country moves a little closer to authoritarianism”*…
The state of local journalism in the U.S. is an altogether justified topic of concern.
Since 2005, the country has lost more than a fourth of its newspapers (2,500) and is on track to lose a third by 2025. Even though the pandemic was not the catastrophic “extinction-level event” some feared, the country lost more than 360 newspapers between the waning pre-pandemic months of late 2019 and the end of May 2022. All but 24 of those papers were weeklies, serving communities ranging in size from a few hundred people to tens of thousands. Most communities that lose a newspaper do not get a digital or print replacement. The country has 6,380 surviving papers: 1,230 dailies and 5,150 weeklies…
The State of Local News 2022
Research suggests that when newspapers disappear from communities, civic engagement declines (as do voting rates), partisan divides worsen, economic development suffers, and (absent oversight) the costs of local government rise… very sound reasons for concern.
But, as Rachel Matthews suggests, there is another reason to worry. Her focus is on the U.K., but sadly, her point is only too relevant to the U.S….
While we might take issue with the idea that there is less local news, it is undeniable that there is a decline in the legacy local newspaper with which we associate its delivery. This decline is in the numbers of titles and also, significantly, in their visibility. The move to digital has put papers online and also removed the surrounding trappings, such as town centre offices or newspaper sellers, from our streets. Financial pressures mean fewer staff, who are reliant on remote methods of communication rather than being visible in communities.
This loss of the physical newspaper is significant to the historian because the local newspaper’s physical legacy is that most often accessed by both professional and amateur historians…
How will we study the local past when we can’t read all about it? “What do historians lose with the decline of local news?“, from @ProvNewsHistory in @HistoryToday.
[Image above: source]
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As we read all about it, we might send informative birthday greetings to Robert Conley; he was born on this date in 1928. A newspaper, television, and radio reporter, he served a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and NBC News.
But Conley is probably best remembered as the founding host of NPR’s news and cultural program All Things Considered. His (and the show’s) first episode was inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2016.
“You’re gonna need a bigger boat”*…
We’re running out of names; Elizabeth Gibney explains…
By the 2030s, the world will generate around a yottabyte of data per year — that’s 1024 bytes, or the amount that would fit on DVDs stacked all the way to Mars. Now, the booming growth of the data sphere has prompted the governors of the metric system to agree on new prefixes beyond that magnitude, to describe the outrageously big and small.
Representatives from governments worldwide, meeting at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) outside Paris on 18 November, voted to introduce four new prefixes to the International System of Units (SI) with immediate effect. The prefixes ronna and quetta represent 1027 and 1030, and ronto and quecto signify 10−27 and 10−30. Earth weighs around one ronnagram, and an electron’s mass is about one quectogram.
This is the first update to the prefix system since 1991, when the organization added zetta (1021), zepto (10−21), yotta (1024) and yocto (10−24). In that case, metrologists were adapting to fit the needs of chemists, who wanted a way to express SI units on the scale of Avogadro’s number — the 6 × 1023 units in a mole, a measure of the quantity of substances. The more familiar prefixes peta and exa were added in 1975…
Prolific generation of data drove the need for prefixes that denote 1027 and 1030: “How many yottabytes in a quettabyte? Extreme numbers get new names,” from @LizzieGibney in @Nature.
And in other news from the world of metrics: “Do not adjust your clock: scientists call time on the leap second.”
* Jaws
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As we try to keep up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that 60 Minutes, which had premiered two months earlier, introduced its trademark “ticking stopwatch” opening logo/transition. 60 Minutes is, of course, the most-watched television news show in history.
Since near the show’s inception in 1968, the opening of 60 Minutes features a stopwatch. The Aristo (Heuer) design first appeared in 1978. On October 29, 2006, the background changed to red, the title text color changed to white, and the stopwatch was shifted to the upright position. This version was used from 1992 to 2006 (the Square 721 type was changed in 1998). Source
“Relationships have two key components: ‘being close’ and ‘feeling close’.”*…
The marvelous Matt Webb muses on Dunbar’s Number…
150, Dunbar’s number, is the natural size of human social groups. Robin Dunbar’s 1993 paper, where he put forward this hypothesis, is a great read – it’s got twists and turns, so much more in it than just the 150 number…
“Dunbar’s number and how speaking is 2.8x better than picking fleas,” from @genmon.
Dunbar’s original paper is here.
* Robin Dunbar
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As we ruminate on relationships, we might recall that this date in 1954 was, according to the True Knowledge Answer Engine, the most boring day since 1900. The site analyzed more than 300 million historical facts and discovered that April 11, 1954 was the most uneventful news day of the 20th century. No typically newsworthy events occurred at all… though of course now the day has become a bit more newsworthy because it has the distinction of being so completely uneventful.
“I rather think that archives exist to keep things safe – but not secret”*…
Brewster Kahle, founder and head of The Internet Archive couldn’t agree more, and for the last 25 years he’s put his energy, his money– his life– to work trying to make that happen…
In 1996, Kahle founded the Internet Archive, which stands alongside Wikipedia as one of the great not-for-profit knowledge-enhancing creations of modern digital technology. You may know it best for the Wayback Machine, its now quarter-century-old tool for deriving some sort of permanent record from the inherently transient medium of the web. (It’s collected 668 billion web pages so far.) But its ambitions extend far beyond that, creating a free-to-all library of 38 million books and documents, 14 million audio recordings, 7 million videos, and more…
That work has not been without controversy, but it’s an enormous public service — not least to journalists, who rely on it for reporting every day. (Not to mention the Wayback Machine is often the only place to find the first two decades of web-based journalism, most of which has been wiped away from its original URLs.)…
Joshua Benton (@jbenton) of @NiemanLab debriefs Brewster on the occasion of the Archive’s silver anniversary: “After 25 years, Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive are still working to democratize knowledge.”
Amidst wonderfully illuminating reminiscences, Brewster goes right to the heart of the issue…
Corporations continue to control access to materials that are in the library, which is controlling preservation, and it’s killing us….
[The Archive and the movement of which it’s a part are] a radical experiment in radical sharing. I think the winner, the hero of the last 25 years, is the everyman. They’ve been the heroes. The institutions are the ones who haven’t adjusted. Large corporations have found this technology as a mechanism of becoming global monopolies. It’s been a boom time for monopolists.
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As we love librarians, we might send carefully-curated birthday greetings to Frederick Baldwin Adams Jr.; he was born on this date in 1910. A bibliophile who was more a curator than an archivist, he was the the director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City from 1948–1969. His predecessor, Belle da Costa Greene, was responsible for organizing the results of Morgan’s rapacious collecting; Adams was responsible for broadening– and modernizing– that collection, adding works by Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, among many others, along with manuscripts and visual arts, and for enhancing the institution’s role as a research facility.
Adams was also an important collector in his own right. He amassed two of the largest holdings of works by Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as one of the leading collections of writing by Karl Marx and left-wing Americana.
“To ask whether the mainstream media has a conservative or liberal bias is like asking whether al-Qaida uses too much oil in their hummus.”*…
What we talk about when we talk about “the mainstream media”…
Everyone is constantly yelling about the mainstream media, and rarely are we referring to the same thing. Just take the recent whirlwind of news about Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York: A guest on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show said that the mainstream media, too busy hating on Trump, gave Cuomo a pass on his leadership during the pandemic. The Washington Post’s Max Boot wrote that Cuomo’s various scandals show how the mainstream media is tougher on Democrats than on Republicans. David Sirota, founder of the Daily Poster, argued that the “media machine” was too busy celebrating Cuomo to cover him adequately. The Poynter Institute weighed in: “It might be time to dispel the thinking that the so-called ‘mainstream media’ is protecting” Cuomo. Brian Flood, a media reporter for Fox News, contended that the mainstream media went easy on Cuomo while he botched the early vaccine rollout. Meantime, Cuomo’s camp apparently believed that his bad press was manufactured by “a mainstream media desperate for clicks.”
There are many ways to think about what constitutes the mainstream media, if such a thing exists at all. It can refer, simply, to any newspaper or to your local daytime talk show; at its most pernicious, the “mainstream media” represents a conspiracy of gatekeepers. “The elite media set a framework within which others operate,” Noam Chomsky wrote. “That framework works pretty well, and it is understandable that it is just a reflection of obvious power structures.” A popular academic argument describes the mainstream media as actors who wield “power over discourse,” which conjures a certain image: wealthy, white, male. As independent local news withers, and media companies become increasingly corporatized—under the control of large conglomerates and hedge funds—that critique rings all the more true. To Sheryl Kennedy Haydel, a scholar of historically Black college and university newspapers at Louisiana State, the term “mainstream media” remains useful as long as journalism has an equity problem. “The people who are the decision-makers, or even the reporters, don’t look like the nation you and I live in,” she told me…
To some, “mainstream” can be synonymous with “popular”; yet Fox News, consistently ranked the most-watched cable network, is perhaps the loudest megaphone ranting against the mainstream media’s “corrupt cabal.” In May, the Pew Research Center released a report finding “wide agreement” among Americans surveyed that a certain set of outlets are in the mainstream media: ABC News, CNN, the New York Times, MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal; 73 percent said that Fox News belongs to the mainstream. Yet The Sean Hannity Show did not make the mainstream ranks. And among respondents who rely on Fox for political news, as well as those who tune in to NPR, majorities said they believe their preferred source to be mainstream yet different from most other outlets. HuffPost might be the mainstream media, the poll said, but BuzzFeed probably isn’t. The more one looks at the results, the more contradictory they appear.
What is clear is that those of us who use the phrase “mainstream media” have only a loosely shared understanding of reality, at best. And yet we continue to use the same term, one weighted with history, to describe a phenomenon that sounds assured and entrenched but is actually amorphous and dynamic. Perhaps the ambiguity of “the mainstream media” reveals something profound about the messy information ecosystem we’re in…
The history and the current state of a concept– “mainstream media”– that obscures more than it clarifies: “Inside the Lines,” from Savannah Jacobson (@srjacobson1) in @CJR.
* Al Franken
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As we honor honest inquiry, we might recall that it was on this date in 1969 that police raided The Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village, resulting in three days of demonstrations by members of the gay community that launched the gay rights movement.
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