news media
It would be impossible to imagine interstate commerce without the infrastructure of federal highways. Likewise, it’s impossible to imagine the free exchange of ideas and information that democracy requires without the press. This goes beyond news, which is only one component of communities’ informational needs. Consumer alerts, emergency weather... See more
The Media Is Essential Democratic Infrastructure
BuzzFeed’s editors had learned through trial and error that social media was organized in large part around identities. Write compellingly about what it was like to be born in the 1990s, or to be an Iranian from New Jersey, or a Catholic girl, or to grow up with East Asian parents, and thousands of people would share the post with the magic words
... See moreBen Smith • Traffic
For decades, journalists’ incentives had been set pretty much by their editors: you wrote what you were assigned to write, or went where the natural evolution of a story took you. The blog years, and the early flickerings of traffic, had produced a new kind of media powerhouse, in which obscure and partisan figures like Drudge could reward you with
... See moreBen Smith • Traffic
For instance, the way mainstream American political journalism has built in a structural bias toward Republicans. If one side in a two-sided fight is perfectly willing to lie, cheat, steal, and intimidate without remorse in order to win, and journalists, as a matter of genre convention, must “balance” the ledger between “both sides,” in the... See more