Letters Remain

Tag: media

  • News’ Reliance on PR and Wire Services

    News organisations and journalists are becoming less “active gatherers of news” and more “processors of […] second-hand materials”, suggests a surprising study conducted by researchers at Cardiff University. Nick Davies, author of Flat Earth News, commissioned the research and provides a brief overview of this study on the state of current media reporting: Specialists at…

  • Learning to Concentrate and Media Dieting

    Stating that “one of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate”, Alain de Botton‘s short essay for City Journal looks at our “obsession” with current events and how this distracts us from… everything. The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that…

  • Media Consumption and Current Events

    As part of their series on ‘media diets’, The Atlantic Wire is asking a number of media luminaries how they manage the deluge of information we all encounter online. Some names you’ll recognise include David Brooks, Ezra Klein, Tyler Cowen and the following from Clay Shirky discussing his distaste for ‘breaking news’: In general, there’s no real breaking…

  • How an Entertainment Medium Succeeds

    While looking at how piracy and online content has changed ‘traditional media’ (and is continuing to do so), Barrett Garese succinctly points out his vision for the direction online content needs to go to really differentiate itself and, thus, succeed (or any entertainment medium, in fact). Each medium has unique advantages and disadvantages, and the…

  • Reporting and the Internet

    It seems you can’t spend five minutes on the Internet without coming across an opinion piece on the end of traditional media or an article riffing on the age of the blog. I’ve so far refrained from noting (m)any of these articles, mainly because the argument is becoming stale and the articles are so widespread.…

  • Media Usage Over Time (1800–2020)

    Accepting its unscientific’ness, Thomas Baekdal presents an inforgraphic depicting the usage of different types of media over time—from 1800 to 2020. In the past 210 years we have seen an amazing evolution of information. […] But 2009 is also going to be the start of the next revolution. Because everything we know is about to…