In the US, radio began as a free-market free-for-all. More than five hundred radio stations sprang up in less than a decade to explore the possibilities... 40 percent were noncommercial... network of interlinked stations playing local and national content supported by local and national advertising, became dominant players...Soviet Union... ideolo…

“We wanted democracy... but got mobocracy.”... Bots generated one out of every five political messages posted on Twitter in America’s presidential campaign last year... “we need to reform our attention economy.”... groups which had mostly been excluded from the mainstream media... developed the dark arts they would use to further their agendas..…

On fully eight of the nine measures, “polarization increases more for the old than the young.” If Facebook is the problem, then how come the problem is worst among those who don’t use Facebook? ... polarization is accelerating fastest among those using the internet the least... social media is important. It’s just not the whole picture... two mai…

many of us have burrowed into our own echo chambers of information. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 81 percent of respondents said that partisans not only differed about policies, but also about “basic facts.”... if you study the dynamics of how information moves online today, pretty much everything conspires against truth... when confron…

Two convergent trends are making populism a potent negative force. First, democracies have morphed into unrepresentative plutocracies that lead growing numbers of people to feel shut out and voiceless... Media ... business model is now based on social media and clicks, not facts. Clicks depend on theatrical performance, stunts, celebrity, ent…

Segregated social universes, an industry moving from red states to the coasts, and mass media’s revenue decline: The disconnect between two realities shows no sign of abating... American political discourse in 2016 seemed to be running on two self-contained, never-overlapping sets of information... today’s media ecosystem encourage that separatio…

This isn’t the first time I’ve covered the impact of social media on news; technologies like augmented reality; and the impact of both on society. It is the first time these Top3ics have meshed so perfectly in one month.

My first subscribers, surveyed last week, were equally split between the diverse formats and styles of my first four editions, so here’s a 5th.