The Atlantic – Getty
Over the past decade, Silicon Valley has learned that news is a messy, expensive, low-margin business—the kind that, if you’re not careful, can turn a milquetoast CEO into an international villain and get you dragged in front of Congress. No surprise, then, that Big Tech has decided it’s done with the enterprise altogether. After the 2016 election, news became a bug rather than a feature, a burdensome responsibility of truth arbitration that no executive particularly wanted to deal with.….Continue reading….
Source: The Atlantic
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Critics:
According to some theories, “news” is whatever the news industry sells. Journalism, broadly understood along the same lines, is the act or occupation of collecting and providing news. From a commercial perspective, news is simply one input, along with paper (or an electronic server) necessary to prepare a final product for distribution.
A news agency supplies this resource “wholesale” and publishers enhance it for retail. Most purveyors of news value impartiality, neutrality, and objectivity, despite the inherent difficulty of reporting without political bias. Perception of these values has changed greatly over time as sensationalized ‘tabloid journalism‘ has risen in popularity.
Michael Schudson has argued that before the era of World War I and the concomitant rise of propaganda, journalists were not aware of the concept of bias in reporting, let alone actively correcting for it. News is also sometimes said to portray the truth, but this relationship is elusive and qualified. Paradoxically, another property commonly attributed to news is sensationalism, the disproportionate focus on, and exaggeration of, emotive stories for public consumption.
This news is also not unrelated to gossip, the human practice of sharing information about other humans of mutual interest. A common sensational topic is violence; hence another news dictum, “if it bleeds, it leads”. Newsworthiness is defined as a subject having sufficient relevance to the public or a special audience to warrant press attention or coverage.
News values seem to be common across cultures. People seem to be interested in news to the extent which it has a big impact, describes conflicts, happens nearby, involves well-known people, and deviates from the norms of everyday happenings. War is a common news topic, partly because it involves unknown events that could pose personal danger.
The spread of news has always been linked to the communications networks in place to disseminate it. Thus, political, religious, and commercial interests have historically controlled, expanded, and monitored communications channels by which news could spread. Postal services have long been closely entwined with the maintenance of political power in a large area.
One of the imperial communication channels, called the “Royal Road” traversed the Assyrian Empire and served as a key source of its power. The Roman Empire maintained a vast network of roads, known as cursus publicus, for similar purposes. Visible chains of long-distance signaling, known as optical telegraphy, have also been used throughout history to convey limited types of information.
These can have ranged from smoke and fire signals to advanced systems using semaphore codes and telescopes. The latter form of optical telegraph came into use in Japan, Britain, France, and Germany from the 1790s through the 1850s. News can travel through different communication media. In modern times, printed news had to be phoned into a newsroom or brought there by a reporter, where it was typed and either transmitted over wire services or edited and manually set in type along with other news stories for a specific edition.
Today, the term “breaking news” has become trite as commercial broadcasting United States cable news services that are available 24 hours a day use live communications satellite technology to bring current events into consumers‘ homes as the event occurs. Events that used to take hours or days to become common knowledge in towns or in nations are fed instantaneously to consumers via radio, television, mobile phone, and the internet.
Speed of news transmission varies wildly on the basis of where and how one lives. In the 20th century, global news coverage was dominated by a combination of the “Big Four” news agencies—Reuters, Associated Press, Agence France Press, and United Press International—representing the Western bloc, and the Communist agencies: TASS from the Soviet Union, and Xinhua from China.
Studies of major world events, and analyses of all international news coverage in various newspapers, consistently found that a large majority of news items originated from the four biggest wire services. Television news agencies include Associated Press Television News, which bought and incorporated World Television News; and Reuters Television. Bloomberg News created in the 1990s, expanded rapidly to become a player in the realm of international news.
The Associated Press also maintains a radio network with thousands of subscribers worldwide; it is the sole provider of international news to many small stations. By some accounts, dating back to the 1940s, the increasing interconnectedness of the news system has accelerated the pace of human history itself.
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