Were you thinking newspaper folks were starting to wise up?

Narrative Science automates the creation of editorial narratives across a wide range of content verticals. Their technology application requires no human authoring or editing and can be used to generate narratives about any event that produces significant quantitative data (think sports, financial, health, community data).  Saridakis saying kthxbye to Gannett

Content automated like your ILECs and ISPs always imagined it: Are Sportswriters Really Necessary?
 

You can gaze, but you can't see

[cleaned up a bit to make, hopefully, clearer]

Part of the reason the current frantic scribbling about US journalism's prospects of economic dissolution seems arid, tepid and inconsequential is that it takes place within the same tidy, unreal frame in which news is conventionally represented as taking place. Now that the framers of the journalistic gaze are turning it upon itself their own predicament, they're missing the boat. (Sonderman good on this here and here. I attempt to describe the invisible vessel here and here).

Our hypothesis: Content providers have been working on the plantations without making a nickle from the plantation owners - the ILECS - who rake in profits driven by the labor of the content creators.

What is noteworthy, and indisputable, is that very little of what is contained in the frames of the gazers listed below can be found anywhere in USian media (other than Democracy Now) - even now, after all the economic lies that have been exposed. What do USian journalists read, anyway? There's a form of transparency I'd love to see. Do they ever read actual critique?

A brief supplemental reading list, from here:

Michael Parenti: The Hypocrisies of Capitalism
Nena Baker: The Body Toxic
Raj Patel: Stuffed & Starved
Maude Barlow: Peak Water
Vandana Shiva: On Gandhi
David Suzuki: Betraying Nature
Bill McKibben: Climate Change: Tipping Point
Ralph Nader: The Politics of Health Care
Paul Roberts: Food System in Danger
Satya Sivaraman: Human Rights in India: Binayak Sen
Robert McChesney: Journalism and the Crisis of Democracy
Arun Gupta: Banksta Capitalism

To David Simon

Dear David Simon,

You have gone from the penetrating world of The Wire to the impermeably inelastic world of Build the Wall.

Instead of talking supplicatingly to two publishers as you do in your piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, consider what you, we, and they are dealing with.

The money is in the pipes. The pipes are sucking it all into their nether regions. The money for content is there, but it's been abducted.

The quandary of viable content on the Net is not unlike the quandary of viable healthcare in a world of corporate greed. Consider the parallels; they are legion.

There's much more to be said on this. For now, what I'm saying to you - whose work I have deeply admired - is this: where's your imagination? Where are your investigative instincts? Where is your ability to follow the almighty $ from the streets to the vultures to their insect lords?

Dude. No fucking walls.

More to come.

==

Some of the More: {still in progress}

The hegemonic control over the finite, "hard assets" of the Internet has displaced the power of an infinity of content providers from making anything like real money from end users, who have already paid their fair share to access the Internet - where "Internet" takes the pipes and all the content as one unified entity. Even though it's not literally (as in, legally incorporated as a single entity) unified, it obeys the logic of a single system for the end user. We pay for the Internet and we get the dialtone and we get the content. Only, the dialtone providers keep all the money - not for any logical or legitimate reason, solely because they occupy a certain gatekeeping position on the "superhighway."

Just as corporate control of news organizations has eviscerated the very idea of what news is, as Greenwald so eloquently notes here, so the health insurance industry has so polluted our notion of sociality that it does not seem self-evident to many US citizens, including Max Baucis and roughly 40 Republican Senators, that healthcare is a right that must be available to all.

So too Adam Arvidsson in The Ethical Economy is making the case that branding has changed the nature of the economy, from one of production to one of finance. The moment you move from the product to the financing of the product, you have the desire for HUGE BRAND. Only, hugebrandness, like Lehman Brothers' credibility, is mere rumor of value, distinct from all use. If you have Huge Brand as a journalist, say Greenwald and Lewis Lapham, you are probably as corrupt as the day is long.

The point is, it is our health, and our Internet, that should be at the center - not the financing of healthcare, or the financing of content. The corporate infrastructure makes miching mallecho of the argument's inherent logic before it can begin, because the corporate structure of media and the corporate structure of healthcare are entirely alike (indistinguishable plasmids?). Both are wealth creation centers that, like Ron Suskind's famously anonymous worldbeater, create their own reality -- which the reality-based rest of us are permitted to report on, consume, and bewail.

Study for Raft of the Medusa*

*h/t for image to Juke aka Informant38 aka dirty beloved.