European University Institute Library

Postjournalism and the death of newspapers, The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization, by Andrey Mir

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 381-388)

illustrationscharts

no index present

non fiction

Postjournalism and the death of newspapers

bibliography

1233210698

by Andrey Mir

The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization

...Hundreds of thousands of today’s students have never even touched a newspaper. The market is already ready to drop newspapers, but society is not yet. The last newspaper generation's habits will preserve at least some demand for newspapers for a while. Newspapers will exist as an industrial product for no longer than the mid-2030s. Some vintage use of newspapers may remain afterwards, but it will be a matter of arts, not industry. The least obvious and yet most shocking aspect of the newspapers’ decline is the fact that it reflects the fate of journalism, not just a carrier. This is neither a cyclical crisis nor a matter of transition; this is the end of an era. “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” unveils the economic and cultural mechanisms of agenda-setting in the news media at the final stage of their historical existence. As advertising has fled to the internet and was absorbed there almost entirely by the Google-Facebook duopoly, the news media have been forced to switch to another source of funding – selling content to readers. However, they cannot sell news because news is already known to people from social media newsfeeds. Instead, the media offers the validation of already-known news within a certain value system and the delivery of the “right” news to others. This business necessity forces the media to relocate the gravity of their operation from news to values. Media outlets are increasingly soliciting subscriptions as donations to a cause. To attract donations, they have to focus on “pressing social issues”. The need to pursue reader revenue and therefore the dependence on the audience, with the news no longer being a commodity, is pushing journalism to mutate into postjournalism. Journalism wants its picture to match the world; postjournalism wants the world to match its picture. The ad-driven media manufactured consent. The reader-driven media manufactures anger. The former served consumerism. The latter serves polarization. The author explores polarization as a media effect. Andrey Mir (Andrey Miroshnichenko) is a media scholar and journalist with twenty years in the print media. He is the author of “Human as Media. The Emancipation of Authorship” (2014) and a number of books on media and politics. --, Provided by publisher