News from nowhere
by Edward Jay Epstein · first published 1973
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"In an age when more of the American public relies on television for its news than any other medium, Edward Jay Epstein's detailed, probing analysis of the decision-making process in network news organizations has achieved the status of a classic. Mr. Epstein shows how internal corporate policy and budget requirements shape the direction of television news coverage. What we see on the network evening news, he demonstrates, does not mirror reality because TV's essential aim is not to inform but to excite viewers enough to induce them to "stay tuned.""--Jacket.
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…brought down the President of the United States. Still, Stone saw many faults in the US media landscape, most of which have grown since then: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g> Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere: Television and the News (1973) also affords strong insights to video news and how it is constituted. Again, technology has progressed but many of the fundamental issues, particularly around audience…
on “Why won't some people pay for news? (2022)” ↗…will be due to similar dynamics. And journalists will likely have found their narrative by that point. ________________________________ Notes: 1. A great book detailing this is Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere. It discusses the production of television news circa 1974, though much of the journalistic element applies to other media as well (including voice and video over the Internet). <https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret00epst>…
on “Tech Journalism Doesn’t Know What to Do with Mastodon” ↗…Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly (cited in the famouse Google "Backrub" paper (http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html), Neil Postman's Amusing Ourself to Death, and Edward Jay Espstein, News from Nowhere (https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret00epst). The last looks at television news as of 1971, including the numerous biases built in to the medium through narrative focus, budget constraints, and…
on “The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”” ↗As of the early 1970s, broadcast TV news networks routinely recycled video footage and had no in-house library or research services. Addressed in Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere (1973). https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret00epst/page/n5/m... Early entertainment programming was also often not saved. Some present archives exist soley because audience members "pirated"…
on “The Transitory Nature of Content on the Internet” ↗…limited number of sources, notably news wires (AP, UPI, Reuters, AFP). Television news long relied on newspaper and newswire coverage to shape news priorities for a given day (see Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere). One thing Internet distribution does isn't so much to create a large number of news sources (which may or may not have much by way of independent story discovery or sourcing) as to tear up a given…
on “Why won't some people pay for news? (2022)” ↗We were working on an edition of News from Nowhere for Standard Ebooks, which unfortunately never saw completion. But in the process we found scans of Morris's own first edition, which is truly an artifact of beauty: https://archive.org/details/Newsfromnowhere00MorrA/page/6/mo...…
on “William Morris, Romantic Revolutionary” ↗> "what is the role of humans in a scenario where work is no longer necessary?" People have been fantasizing about this scenario throughout the industrial era--read William Morris' News from Nowhere (1890) for example--but it has failed to come to pass so many times, and the reasons are pretty obvious. The benefits of technology are spread unequally, and increasingly so over time, so only a wealthy…
on “Intelligence is a commodity. Context is the real AI Moat” ↗