A spidery network of mobile online media has supposedly changed people,
places, time, and their meanings. A prime case is the news. Digital webs
seem to have trapped "legacy media," killing off newspapers and
journalists' jobs. Did news businesses and careers fall prey to the
digital "Spider"?
To solve the mystery, Kevin Barnhurst spent thirty years studying news
going back to the realism of the 1800s. The usual suspects--technology,
business competition, and the pursuit of scoops--are only partly to
blame for the fate of news. The main culprit is modernism from the
"Mister Pulitzer" era, which transformed news into an ideology called
"journalism." News is no longer what audiences or experts imagine.
Stories have grown much longer over the past century and now include
fewer events, locations, and human beings. Background and context rule
instead.
News producers adopted modernism to explain the world without
recognizing how modernist ideas influence the knowledge they produce.
When webs of networked connectivity sparked a resurgence in realist
stories, legacy news stuck to big-picture analysis that can alienate
audience members accustomed to digital briefs.