Social Media Series: The end of mass media: Coming full circle | The Economist

Excerpt:

"...In January 1776 Thomas Paine’s pamphlet “Common Sense”, which rallied the colonists against the British crown, was printed in a run of 1,000 copies. One of them reached George Washington, who was so impressed that he made American officers read extracts of Paine’s work to their men. By July 1776 around 250,000 people, nearly half the free population of the colonies, had been exposed to Paine’s ideas. Newspapers at the time had small, local circulations and were a mix of opinionated editorials, contributions from readers and items from other papers; there were no dedicated reporters. All these early media conveyed news, gossip, opinion and ideas within particular social circles or communities, with little distinction between producers and consumers of information. They were social media.

The rise and fall of mass communications

The invention of the steam press in the early 19th century, and the emergence of mass-market newspapers such as the New York Sun, therefore marked a profound shift. The new technologies of mass dissemination could reach large numbers of people with unprecedented speed and efficiency, but put control of the flow of information into the hands of a select few. For the first time, vertical distribution of news, from a specialist elite to a general audience, had a decisive advantage over horizontal distribution among citizens. This trend accelerated with the advent of radio and television in the 20th century. New businesses grew up around these mass-media technologies. In modern media organisations news is gathered by specialists and disseminated to a mass audience along with advertising, which helps to pay for the whole operation...."

That's interesting: The future of news: Back to the coffee house | The Economist

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Excerpt:

"...And it is not just readers who are challenging the media elite. Technology firms including Google, Facebook and Twitter have become important (some say too important) conduits of news. Celebrities and world leaders, including Barack Obama and Hugo Chávez, publish updates directly via social networks; many countries now make raw data available through “open government” initiatives. The internet lets people read newspapers or watch television channels from around the world: the Guardian, a British newspaper, now has more online readers abroad than at home. The web has allowed new providers of news, from individual bloggers to sites such as the Huffington Post, to rise to prominence in a very short space of time. And it has made possible entirely new approaches to journalism, such as that practised by WikiLeaks, which provides an anonymous way for whistleblowers to publish documents. The news agenda is no longer controlled by a few press barons and state outlets, like the BBC.

We contort, you deride

In principle, every liberal should celebrate this. A more participatory and social news environment, with a remarkable diversity and range of news sources, is a good thing. A Texan who once had to rely on the Houston Chronicle to interpret the world can now collect information from myriad different sources. Authoritarian rulers everywhere have more to fear. So what, many will say, if journalists have less stable careers? All the same, two areas of concern stand out.

The first worry is the loss of “accountability journalism”, which holds the powerful to account. Shrinking revenues have reduced the amount and quality of investigative and local political reporting in the print press...."

Social Media Series: Bulletins from the future | The Economist

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Excerpt from original article by Tom Standage:

'EVEN IF YOU are not a news junkie, you will have noticed that your daily news has undergone a transformation. Television newscasts now include amateur videos, taken from video-sharing websites such as YouTube, covering events like the Arab spring or the Japanese tsunami. Such videos, with their shaky cameras and people’s unguarded reactions, have much greater immediacy than professional footage. Messages posted on Twitter, the microblogging service, have been woven into coverage of these events and many others. “You have these really intimate man-in-the-street accounts, and you can craft a narrative around them,” says Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter. A computer consultant in Pakistan unwittingly described the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in a series of tweets. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008, too, were reported on Twitter in real time by people who were there.

The past year has also seen the rise to fame of WikiLeaks, an organisation that publishes leaked documents supplied to it anonymously. WikiLeaks and its media partners have published detailed records of the Afghan and Iraq wars, hundreds of classified American diplomatic cables and records from the Guantánamo Bay detention centre. “We believe that true information does good,” says Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ founder. “Our goal is not just to have people reading documents, but to achieve political reforms through the release of information.”...'

Social media Series: The people formerly known as the audience | The Economist

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Excerpt:

"....Surveys in Britain and America suggest that 7-9% of the population use Twitter, compared with almost 50% for Facebook. But Twitter users are the “influencers”, says Nic Newman, former head of future media at the BBC and now a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University. “The audience isn’t on Twitter, but the news is on Twitter,” says Mr Jones.

Thanks to the rise of social media, news is no longer gathered exclusively by reporters and turned into a story but emerges from an ecosystem in which journalists, sources, readers and viewers exchange information. The change began around 1999, when blogging tools first became widely available, says Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University. The result was “the shift of the tools of production to the people formerly known as the audience,” he says. This was followed by a further shift: the rise of “horizontal media” that made it quick and easy for anyone to share links (via Facebook or Twitter, for example) with large numbers of people without the involvement of a traditional media organisation. In other words, people can collectively act as a broadcast network..."

Impressive: Megan Ellison: the billionaire heiress out to save the movies | via guardian.co.uk

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Excerpt:

"...Her name is Megan Ellison. You will, I imagine, be hearing it again – the speed of her rise to prominence, fuelled by family wealth and apparently flawless taste, makes her an intriguing proposition. Only three years ago, she was just another fun-loving billionaire heiress barely out of her teens and having her lifestyle choices ridiculed by gossip sites; a year ago she had a single film to her name as a producer, a low-voltage psychodrama called Waking Madison that went straight to DVD. Now, however, it's been joined not only by one of the most lauded pictures of the last 12 months – the Coen brothers' True Grit, which she co-financed – but a startlingly large chunk of the most interesting movies lurking up the pipeline.

Specifically? Well (you may want to take a breath here), there's the as-yet untitled reunion of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman; director John Hillcoat's 1920s-set The Wettest County in the World; Wong Kar-Wai's martial arts extravaganza The Grandmasters; Kathryn Bigelow's account of the killing of Osama bin Laden; a crime number from Andrew Dominik, starring Brad Pitt and James Gandolfini – and, most alluring of all, the new film from Paul Thomas Anderson. Or rather two new films from Paul Thomas Anderson, one an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's woozy crime novel Inherent Vice, the other a resuscitation of The Master, the long-gestating project widely thought to be based on the Church of Scientology's founder L Ron Hubbard, abandoned by its original backer and presumed dead until Ellison's intervention. Every one is now to be either made or distributed by her company, Annapurna Pictures...."

LOVE Patrick Cain's Data Viz Maps Part 2: Wellbeing Toronto

What do you think? Discuss Wellbeing Toronto on Twitter at #WBtor.

From Patrick Cain's site:

"This was also published at globalnews.ca

The City of Toronto’s long-awaited Wellbeing Toronto map site launched today (in beta), giving users the ability to map 140 officially-defined neighbourhoods by dozens of different data points, from arson to breast cancer screening to sports facilities. It’s a much more user-friendly approach to open data than we’ve seen in Toronto (and elsewhere) up till now.

Most of the possible maps are based on census criteria: age, income, ethnicity, employment.

Many of the grimmer social indicators take a familiar checkmark shape across the face of the city. Premature mortality, for example, works southeast from Rexdale down Black Creek Drive into the west end, through patchy parts of downtown and then northeast into Scarborough. It’s the shape of Bad Things in Toronto – it’s repeated on maps I’ve created with high school dropouts, STIs, homicides with male victims and on and on..."