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Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization
– “Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers” may be the most profound analysis of the subject since the last time Marshall McLuhan wrote about it. Mir describes a universe in which the news now chases the reader rather than the other way around. Everything is told in a wonderful epigrammatic style – you will be digging up quotes from it for years. – Martin Gurri, author of “The Revolt of the Public”.
– The most important book in media theory that has been written in 40 years. – Paul Levinson, author of “Digital McLuhan”.
– Andrey Mir’s “Postjournalism” offers a powerful, sweeping narrative of how news media have evolved over the centuries. – Arnold Kling, economist, author of “Crisis of Abundance” and “Invisible Wealth”.
– In his book “Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers”, Mir is here partly to praise newspapers, partly to bury them, but mostly to explain why their death is (a) inevitable and (b) a very big deal. He communicates this with a history of news media and a blizzard of concepts and neologisms. – Danyl Mclauchlan, “The Spinoff,” New Zealand.
– As Mir argues, this change in the economic structure of the news media has quietly transformed journalism from a theoretically neutral means of “manufacturing consent” into a political cause that people are rallied into supporting, usually by inciting them to some form of outrage. – Murtaza Hussain, “The Intercept”.
...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 manufacture anger. The former served consumerism. The latter serve polarization.
The author explores polarization as a media effect. Andrey Mir (Andrey Miroshnichenko) is a media expert 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. Twitter: @Andrey4Mir.
– The most important book in media theory that has been written in 40 years. – Paul Levinson, author of “Digital McLuhan”.
– Andrey Mir’s “Postjournalism” offers a powerful, sweeping narrative of how news media have evolved over the centuries. – Arnold Kling, economist, author of “Crisis of Abundance” and “Invisible Wealth”.
– In his book “Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers”, Mir is here partly to praise newspapers, partly to bury them, but mostly to explain why their death is (a) inevitable and (b) a very big deal. He communicates this with a history of news media and a blizzard of concepts and neologisms. – Danyl Mclauchlan, “The Spinoff,” New Zealand.
– As Mir argues, this change in the economic structure of the news media has quietly transformed journalism from a theoretically neutral means of “manufacturing consent” into a political cause that people are rallied into supporting, usually by inciting them to some form of outrage. – Murtaza Hussain, “The Intercept”.
...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 manufacture anger. The former served consumerism. The latter serve polarization.
The author explores polarization as a media effect. Andrey Mir (Andrey Miroshnichenko) is a media expert 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. Twitter: @Andrey4Mir.
388 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 28, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 19, 2021
This is a strange and brilliant book that I plan to write a longer review about later on. Some of the key takeaways are how the altered funding model of journalism as a result of the internet has led media to induce different forms of reality. Whereas the ad-funded media was chastised for unduly beautifying reality and "manufacturing consent" in order to create an accommodating environment for consumerism, ever since advertising abandoned the news for social networking platforms news organizations have switched to a subscription model that asks people to essentially join a political cause. It also requires generating constant anger and polarization to keep people stimulated enough and the wheels turning. We are evolutionarily primed to focus more on negative news because our honing to detect threats and thus painting a dark and destructive picture of the world is the best way of driving reader engagement when that is the that that is needed for bare minimum survival. According to the old Chomsky-Herman propaganda mode, news coverage has to be somehow oriented towards an identified enemy. During the 20th century that identified enemy was usually the Soviet Union. But now it's our own domestic partisan political rivals. Whereas the old media sold the audience to advertisers and information to the public, now social networks sell online self-actualization to the public and advertisers flock to them accordingly. The days of news outlets as massive, well-funded, industrial conglomerates is well and truly over. They are instead chasing desperately after whatever the cloud is saying, offering their main service as simply validator or navigator of the raw news that is already available out there.
Any idea that the media offers a holistic picture of reality should be utterly abandoned. It was not true in the ad-driven era and is especially untrue in the postjournalism age with its donation driven model and heavy social network pressures. Discourse is in fact increasingly narrowed to whatever people find triggering enough to talk about, rather than what is actually taking place according to any ranking of gravity or importance. The collective Viral Editor of the online world is not like the old newspaper editor who in theory curated a balanced daily curriculum for readers. The cloud contains enough raw information to allow individuals to construct their own fully-formed, coherent realities and their own truths rather than compelling them to conform to any particular standard. Inevitably people build up these truths and clash them against the preferred truths of others, with massification ultimately becoming the key metric for what's considered "true" or not. Mir paints a dire picture of traditional journalism's future, arguing that it is already crippled by its loss of a viable business model and the emancipation of authorship and truth now enjoyed by every single individual, government, and corporate brand. People read what they find interesting, and sometimes it's journalism. And in postmodern style, believe can believe what they want to believe and always find enough justification for doing so.
People live inside the full-spectrum digital sensorium of the internet today. This is a fundamentally different experience from reading a newspaper produced as a result of a hierarchical industrial process. There's no strong reason to believe that journalism as we considered it to exist before this, not to mention small-t truth, will survive this epochal shift. It turned out that much of what made the media special was its monopoly on publishing and production. Now that those functions have been emancipated for everyone's use we see that the power of the media has suffered a mortal blow. As Neil Postman wrote, fifty years after the Gutenberg press was introduced it wasn't merely a Europe in which some characteristics had shifted, it was a new place. The internet is making the world a new place, in some ways more angry and divided, and our best hope is to at least be aware that this is happening while using it. This can potentially save us from descending into its maelstrom, and, perhaps, even allow us to enjoy it.
Any idea that the media offers a holistic picture of reality should be utterly abandoned. It was not true in the ad-driven era and is especially untrue in the postjournalism age with its donation driven model and heavy social network pressures. Discourse is in fact increasingly narrowed to whatever people find triggering enough to talk about, rather than what is actually taking place according to any ranking of gravity or importance. The collective Viral Editor of the online world is not like the old newspaper editor who in theory curated a balanced daily curriculum for readers. The cloud contains enough raw information to allow individuals to construct their own fully-formed, coherent realities and their own truths rather than compelling them to conform to any particular standard. Inevitably people build up these truths and clash them against the preferred truths of others, with massification ultimately becoming the key metric for what's considered "true" or not. Mir paints a dire picture of traditional journalism's future, arguing that it is already crippled by its loss of a viable business model and the emancipation of authorship and truth now enjoyed by every single individual, government, and corporate brand. People read what they find interesting, and sometimes it's journalism. And in postmodern style, believe can believe what they want to believe and always find enough justification for doing so.
People live inside the full-spectrum digital sensorium of the internet today. This is a fundamentally different experience from reading a newspaper produced as a result of a hierarchical industrial process. There's no strong reason to believe that journalism as we considered it to exist before this, not to mention small-t truth, will survive this epochal shift. It turned out that much of what made the media special was its monopoly on publishing and production. Now that those functions have been emancipated for everyone's use we see that the power of the media has suffered a mortal blow. As Neil Postman wrote, fifty years after the Gutenberg press was introduced it wasn't merely a Europe in which some characteristics had shifted, it was a new place. The internet is making the world a new place, in some ways more angry and divided, and our best hope is to at least be aware that this is happening while using it. This can potentially save us from descending into its maelstrom, and, perhaps, even allow us to enjoy it.
February 18, 2021
The full title of Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. The Media after Trump: Manufacturing Anger and Polarization by Andrey Mir says it all: the delivery of news on Twitter and social media to an increasing majority of people has replaced the attempt to disseminate facts and truth on traditional news media, with the new goal of massive engagement via likes, retweets, and shares, with the result that an informed public, however imperfectly constructed, is being shoved aside by a polarized populace seething with anger. I would add: this is also the best book on media theory and assessment written in forty years. [Read the rest of my review here.
February 5, 2021
Excellent explanation of why the media is polarized. Well researched, with an extensive bibliography.
January 17, 2022
The first half of the book was insightful and interesting. The second half seemed to be slow and repeating the same ideas again.
November 4, 2021
It is very good, but repetitive. Could have used another round of edits.
March 26, 2025
Postjournalism is frequently provocative and occasionally insightful. But in the end, for me, there is just not enough in the way of evidence. There aren't even that many examples. For every claim, though, I could think up several counterexamples.
There's something here and the approach, thinking about the economic changes and the way the business model shapes the production and consumption of news, is promising. But this book ends up oddly uninterested in describing the world as it is.
There's something here and the approach, thinking about the economic changes and the way the business model shapes the production and consumption of news, is promising. But this book ends up oddly uninterested in describing the world as it is.
November 3, 2021
I won “Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. The Media after Trump: Manufacturing Anger and Polarization” by Andrey Mir in a goodreads giveaway.
This book reads like a thesis paper and has fact after fact about the life and the eventual death of newspapers. No fluff here so don’t expect tons of filler. Worth reading if you want to get into the mind of someone who has obviously spent a lot of time thinking about this.
Four stars.
This book reads like a thesis paper and has fact after fact about the life and the eventual death of newspapers. No fluff here so don’t expect tons of filler. Worth reading if you want to get into the mind of someone who has obviously spent a lot of time thinking about this.
Four stars.
January 1, 2022
The news
A work that reviews the history of newspapers and its various business models. Describes the current situation and the relationship with journalism. Are newspapers dead, but just haven't caught on? For that matter has journalism died as well? As a longtime consumer of newspapers (Almost continuous since living on my own 1971) the subject is of interest.
I received a complementary copy via #GoodreadsGiveaway.
A work that reviews the history of newspapers and its various business models. Describes the current situation and the relationship with journalism. Are newspapers dead, but just haven't caught on? For that matter has journalism died as well? As a longtime consumer of newspapers (Almost continuous since living on my own 1971) the subject is of interest.
I received a complementary copy via #GoodreadsGiveaway.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews