May 2012
1 post
Journalism and Documents- A Preliminary Attempt To...
So this is the first thing I’ve written about any of this.
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The material turn in the humanities and the social sciences is, by now, well underway. Perhaps surprisingly, the field of “media studies” — often wrongly understood the to be little more than the analysis what John Durham Peters described as “communication without embodiment, contact achieved by the sharing of...
December 2011
1 post
Data Journalism, 1911 Protestant Revival Style
From: Bateman, Bradley W (2001). “Make a Righteous Number: Social Surveys, the Men and Religion Forward Movement, and Quantification in American Economics.” History of Political Economy, Volume 33, Annual Supplement, 2001, pp. 57-85
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The [1911] Men and Religion Forward Movement had special features that no previous [Protestant] revival had employed. One of these was an...
September 2011
1 post
Beware of Journalists Bearing Solutions?
The slightly longer version of my challenge to Jonathan Stray and Blair Hickman:
Background: Stray (“Journalism for Makers,”) Hickman (“Solution Journalism.”)
The challenge: By what right, and on what grounds, do journalists claim the authority to offer solutions to any particularly difficult problem? Journalists are neither elected, nor particularly accountable, nor all...
August 2011
1 post
Algorithms and Journalism: A Very Short Starting...
When we start thinking about documents, sources, and direct interviews as news objects— objects that present particular evidentiary claims and are embedded in specific historical trajectories— we can see that there might be additional objects that also constitute fragments of journalistic evidence, but which are less universally discussed by either journalism educators or journalism...
June 2011
1 post
My Elevator Pitch
The thing about ethnographic research is that it can take you a half-decade or more to summarize your findings. Seriously.
Anderson’s study of news production in Philadelphia is the first ethnographic analysis of news production to examine the entirety of a local news ecosystem, rather than a few key institutions within that ecosystem. Much of the current crisis in journalism is blamed on...
May 2011
1 post
Objects, Not Objectivity
Journalistic practices are methodological practices, even though scholarly researchers (and journalists themselves) do not often speak of them that way. Just as lawyers, sociologists, and physicists each weave together a diverse set of discourses, technologies, shards of evidence, and institutional frameworks to produce particular patterns of truth, so do journalists. To date, most of the...
March 2011
8 posts
Playlist: Classical Music Inspired by New York...
I’ve been keeping a running list in my head of classical music (and related) pieces either directly or indirectly inspired by New York City. Because New York is a (relatively) new city, the music that falls into this category is usually stuff I like quite a lot — modern, for one thing, often dissonant, but sometime very lyrical. Anyway, I have an iTunes list up and running of this...
Analog #1 (Noise Study)
Analog #1 (Noise Study) (James Tenney, 1961)
One of the first pieces of electronic music, this was inspired by Tenney’s daily commute under the Holland Tunnel between New York and New Jersey. I can’t find a sound clip uploaded online, but here’s a link to a description of the piece. And you can also buy it on iTunes.
Reading "After Capitalism: Ethics?" by Adam...
(note: this could all be totally wrong)
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The original document is here.
I’m interested in this topic because I think the ways we traditionally think about questions like— does the Huffington Post exploit its bloggers?— are increasingly inadequate and unhelpful.
Arvidsson (it seems to me) is largely operating against the theoretical background of Autonomist Marxism....
February 2011
2 posts
Web 2.0- An Early Stab at the Term
[I’m trying to summarize the idea of Web 2.0 as a bibliographic encyclopedia entry. Here’s an early stab at how I’m going to try to approach it]
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For scholars of communication, technology, journalistic practice, and digital culture, “Web 2.0” is contested concept. Of apparently tremendous popular importance, “Web 2.0” is considered by many academics to be little more...
Are We Saying That Twitter Creates Revolutions?...
[update (2:28pm): I wrote this post very fast. Because of that, it’s a little opaque in places. So what it really about? I’m trying to work through a feeling that, even though no one has said Twitter causes revolutions, a bunch of people feel like somebody, somewhere has said it. And while some folks, as Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis argue, are deliberately distorting these claims, other...
December 2010
1 post
How Julian Assange Learned to Love Networked...
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, on why his original version of commons-based news analysis failed, why he turned back to the professional news organizations, and what amateurs still bring to the world of networked journalism.
I basically went through this same learning process myself over a period of a decade or so. I’m not as smart as Assange, so it took a lot longer.
I was pointed...
November 2010
2 posts
"They both dream of going on, unhinder'd"
“They both dream of going on, unhinder’d, as the Halt dream of running, the Earth-bound of flying. Rays of light appear from behind Clouds, the faces of Bison on close Approach grow more human, unbearably so, as if just about to speak, Rivers run swifter and wider, till at last the Party halts before one that mayn’t be cross’d, even by the sturdiest Batoe,- that for miles...
From "Politics as a Vocation"
“But such is not the case. Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but also the proletarian has lost his rights. When this night shall have slowly receded, who of those for whom spring apparently has bloomed so luxuriously will be alive?...
October 2010
2 posts
Barriers to Collaborative News Production
(from a forthcoming chapter and blog post)
This chapter begins with a question, or rather, a series of questions, inspired by my ethnographic research into local news organizations between 2005 and today. Why do my own findings about the difficulties of cross-newsroom collaboration in the emerging local news ecosystem seem to run counter to evidence that organizational collaboration is an...
Linking in the News - An Overview of the...
Linking in the News - An Overview of the Scholarship
The scholarly discussion of online news linking practices is scattered and difficult to summarize. Usefully, hypertext was such an obvious feature of the new online medium that linking was analyzed in some of the earliest articles about newspapers’ transition to the internet (Riley et. al. 1998, Peng 1999) Less helpfully, however, the lack of a...
June 2010
1 post
Philly Book Nut Graf
I want to discuss some of the threads that stitch Networking the News together. I will focus on four of them: first, the fracturing of both the image and materiality of journalism’s local “public”; second, the continued centrality of reporting within the journalistic imagination (as well as the challenges to that centrality); third, the “non-diffusion” of cross-organizational collaboration; and...
February 2010
2 posts
Three Dimensions of Newswork: An Initial...
The basic act of journalism has three dimensions. Often, these dimensions are confused, and are not usually discussed in an analytically distinct fashion. This confusion leads to insane and scarcely serious claims; for instance, that Twitpics of the downed US Airways Flight 1549 will lead to the end of professional journalism, or that Wikipedia is a functional impossibility. We need to separate...
“The secret of the influence of [partisan newspapers on a community] is not so...”
– The Detroit Post, (1867)
December 2009
1 post
What I thought John Dewey, John Law, and Sterolab...
“There is no sense in asking how individuals come to be associated. They exist and operate in association. If there is any mystery about the matter, it is the mystery that the universe is the kind of universe it is.”
—John Dewey, The Public and its Problems
“Any organization is an achievement, a process, a consequence, a set of resistances overcome, a precarious effect. Its...