On May 4 an event at All-Souls Unitarian a workshop and dinner will feature Mubarak Awad, a Palestinian-American psychologist and an advocate of nonviolent resistance.
The program will be “The Role of the Media in Violent and Nonviolent Conflict”.
More information to follow, and tickets to the event and dinner may be purchased soon on our website under the Tickets category on the FCM main menu.
Got a suggestion for adding more media organization contacts? Send an email to savethemedia@cs.com with your suggestions.
https://ourfcm.org/about-us/links/ Media contacts link page on this website
An 11/1/22 article from American Psychological Association by Charlotte Huff
Headline: “Media Overload is Hurting Our Mental Health. Here Are Some Ways to Manage Headline Stress”
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/11/strain-media-overload
“By June 2020, 83% of Americans reported stress over the nation’s future, as they attempted to process dispiriting and converging news events, including economic turmoil, racial injustice, and the pandemic, according to APA’s Stress in America survey. That feeling of strain continued to be reflected in the March 2022 survey; 73% of Americans reported being overwhelmed by the number of crises facing the world at that point.”
A couple of year ago, “when Americans were asked to evaluate the media’s standing in the nation, about four-in-ten (41%) say news organizations are growing in their influence, somewhat higher than the one-third (33%) who say their influence is declining, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted March 8-14, 2021.”
PEW research poll 5/17/21
Article from the Guardian “If Meta’s intransigence isn’t enough, AI poses an even greater threat to journalism”
by Margaret Simons 3/1/24
“This could be the most catastrophic threat to the sustainability of professional journalism so far, in an industry that has barely recovered from the flight of classified advertising to online platforms in the 90s and the exodus of most of the rest of the advertising revenue to Google and Facebook since 2014”
“What can be done? All the news media companies are carefully watching the way that Microsoft and Google are integrating AI into search.
“Many news media are blocking outfits like OpenAI from scraping their sites. Google and Microsoft are harder to stop. It is not clear that it can be done.
“Copyright law – a limp and fuzzy beast – may not be adequate to stop the cannibalism, but publishers are keeping their options open on legal action.
“What about the news media bargaining code? At the moment it doesn’t cover the use of media content for training the AI robots – but perhaps, with modification, it could.”
From the New York Times 2/28/24 article, “How the Media Industry Keeps Losing the Future” By David Streitfeld
“Thirty years ago, Mr. Fidler was a media executive pushing a reassuring vision of the future of newspapers. The digital revolution would liberate news from printing presses, giving people portable devices that kept them informed all day long. Some stories would be enhanced by video, others by sound and animation. Readers could share articles, driving engagement across diverse communities.
“All that has come to pass, more or less. Everyone is online all the time, and just about everyone seems interested, if not obsessed, by national and world happenings. But the traditional media that Mr. Fidler was championing do not receive much benefit. After decades of decline, their collapse seems to be accelerating.
“Every day brings bad news. Sometimes it is about recently formed digital enterprises, sometimes venerable publications whose history stretches back more than a century . . . “
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/technology/news-media-industry-dying.html
“The slow crash of newspapers and magazines would be of limited interest save for one thing: Traditional media had at its core the exalted and difficult mission of communicating information about the world.”
No more ad-Vice .
From the 2/27/24 Guardian article “Vice’s cunning, irreverent journalism is dead – and executives with bloated pay cheques helped kill it” by Sirin Kale
Huge salaries for those at the top, and the changing digital media landscape eventually doomed Vice News.
Sinclair has formula for making money off of tragedy. From the Washington Post 2/16/24.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/16/sinclair-broadcasting-conservative-media-trump/
From the Washington Post, 2/16/24 “Sinclair’s recipe for TV news: Crime, homelessness, illegal drugs” by Sarah Ellison
Sub-headline: “The local news powerhouse, whose chairman recently bought the Baltimore Sun, focuses on fear in broadcasts that often align with Donald Trump’s view of cities”
From the New Yorker Weekend Essay, 2/10/24 “Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event? by By Clare Malone
Sub headline: “Ads are scarce, search and social traffic is dying, and readers are burned out. The future will require fundamentally rethinking the press’s relationship to its audience”
“A report that tracked layoffs in the industry in 2023 recorded twenty-six hundred and eighty-one in broadcast, print, and digital news media. NBC News, Vox Media, Vice News, Business Insider, Spotify, theSkimm, FiveThirtyEight, The Athletic, and Condé Nast—the publisher of The New Yorker—all made significant layoffs. BuzzFeed News closed, as did Gawker. The Washington Post, which lost about a hundred million dollars last year, offered buyouts to two hundred and forty employees”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/is-the-media-prepared-for-an-extinction-level-event
“Two hundred and four counties in the U.S. now have no local news—high-poverty areas are most affected—and, by the end of this year, it’s expected that the U.S. will have lost a third of its newspapers,” the article also said.