In the midst of death
A brief meditation on Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death and the role of the fear of death in American politics and society
Many Too Many
A blog full of quick thoughts and dumb takes from a certified expert
Dormant Last read · last published · next check
Read 1 day ago and current, but nothing has been published for 2 years.
Latest posts
A series of unfortunate kludges for doing content analysis of radio
It took a lot of tinkering, but I have finally constructed a very rickety but working method to capture multiple simultaneous radio streams, starting and stopping at various arbitrary times. And you can do it too!
Journalism is context
It’s not too strong to say that, fundamentally, journalism is context. Facts have different meanings in different contexts, and the contextual work is the communicative work of journalism. Disrupting and disconnecting that context is the structural work of online social platforms.
Opinion journalism that doesn't do journalism is just opinion
Opinion journalism, as a practice and as a body of work, takes a lot of flak.
News is not a market commodity
Putting your “real” news and other sources’ “fake” news in one big pot and expecting to float to the top fundamentally misunderstands what news is, and it’s the industry’s biggest long-term challenge.
Open tabs, January 25
Four quick links
The forest is made of trees
I saw Spotlight for the first time a few days ago, and as a dramatization of journalism there were two things that struck me as incredibly insightful but easy to lose track of in the film’s narrative.
Moving forward: RQ5. Who sets Trump’s agenda?
In my post on media effects, I mentioned that Donald Trump himself had essentially become a media outlet as far as news information flows were concerned.
The 2016 campaign was a study in media effects
As different as the 2016 election cycle was from the norm, in many ways the actions and attitudes of the national political press were entirely as usual. This was especially true when it came to how reporters saw their influence on the public when they were critiqued over their coverage of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Meowtivated reasoning
Every year or so, when a little news boomlet happens about a new study of the number of small animals killed by loose cats, I think about how his first four months or so went. He’s an inside cat now, but he loves being outside in the harness that he hates. We also have inside birds (because we are dumb) who have their own room (because we are smart), and he loves them too, in a way.