Aram Zucker-Scharff

““There’s a point a lot of us go through … to understand you’ve been systematically excluded from the various television shows and artforms you’ve grown up on””

– Nickelodeon and Diversity.

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“The sheer increase in the media’s — and by extension, the country’s — attention span when Ebola made its way across the Atlantic is staggering. According to a Pew Research Center poll, it outranked protests in Hong Kong, the Secret Service’s troubles and airstrikes against ISIS by the U.S. as the story Americans focused on the most. Thirty-six percent reported that they paid “very close” attention to the story, up from 25% in mid-August. By comparison, it also eclipsed other outbreak-related stories, including mad cow disease in Europe, MERS in the Middle East and swine flu in Mexico and the U.S.

“Us” versus “them.” For Carrilho, the nature of the Western media hysteria over Ebola underscores a more pernicious trend in how the West views the rest of the world. More than any other event in recent memory, the Ebola epidemic has brought to light America’s lingering and simmering fear of “the other.” The media circus is doing more than perpetuating the idea that America may become victim to a deadly epidemic — they’re implying the country’s very purity is at risk. “

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– One Powerful Illustration Shows Exactly What’s Wrong With How the West Talks About Ebola.

“But there was actually a sense of something even more troubling — a loss of control. Journalists don’t often say this out loud, but we do think there’s an element of art to what we do. And what do most artists want, as much if not more than money? Creative control. But permeating almost every session was a sense of desperation — at regaining some kind of control over how we connect and impact with our audience. The homepages that newsrooms have sunk countless dollars and person-hours into upgrading are already dying a rapid death. Increasingly, story traffic depends on the whim of the swipes — with faceless folks in the bowels of Silicon Valley, at Google and increasingly at the social media giants of Twitter and especially Facebook, exerting an inordinate amount of power. If there was one word that I heard more than “viral” at the ONA, it was “algorithm.” Facebook has completed coded the way that millions of would-be news consumers get information, and no one knows how to crack it.”

– Looking for the soul of journalism’s new machines at ONA2014.

“”Who’d want to buy dozens of newspapers? The industry’s print advertising revenue is in barely controlled freefall, down eight percent a year since 2011; this budget season’s now-familiar gut-wrenching forecast for 2015 is the same. Paywall-related revenue and digital advertising initiatives have only partially offset that loss. Consequently, figure it’s been 84 months or so of unending downward revenue trajectory; 2007 was the last year of significant revenue growth. Only deep cost-cutting, including the downsizing of America’s daily newsrooms by 30 percent or 20,000 jobs, has maintained high single-digit to to low-double-digit profitability. How long can that strategy last before the last print subscriber cancels in frustration?””

– The newsonomics of auctioning off Digital First’s newspapers (and California schemin’).