Face It, You Just Don’t Care About the News Anymore

News... is a standardized nonfiction literary form and only one of the many kinds of a journalistic output.... if the context of what we called “news” for nearly two centuries has radically altered, is news still functioning as it should?...
The invention of the electric telegraph in the 1830s allowed ... bursts of information in ... messages, which were, ironically, not unlike tweets...news of elections, wars, disasters, crimes, weddings, and deaths... transported the middle class from a local perspective to a global one... alongside the Enlightenment... News became how the middle class positioned itself ... Carey in his 1992 essay A Cultural Approach to Communication regarded news as tied to its meaning for the middle class and predicted that it would dissolve when that class no longer finds it relevant...
some serious news organizations have recently seen increases in paid subscription services... a “Trump bump”... monthly fee of the anti-Trump resistance... Carey observed that news is not just a product, but also a symbol and an identity-linked ritual ... nothing new is learned but in which a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed.”...
shift away from globalism... is both geopolitical and social, as if it is no longer fashionable for the middle class to be part of the wider world... the decline of hyperlinks... reflects a wider cultural shift from outward to inward... Yet ... local newspapers have consistently shrunk... implying a lack of wider interest in local municipal elections... the appetite for the “local” is manifesting itself in... Facebook’s recent decision to prioritize updates from friends and family in the news feed... life events of family and friends are the local news for many people...while... people often live away from their network of family and friends...
a bifurcation. On one side, we have notifications... bypassing news organizations... On the other side... longform and long-term journalism is far more expensive and in-depth ... functioning more like nonfiction literature...Whatever we have between these two is an increasingly less viable form of news... if news is almost dead, how can journalism — and thereby democracy — survive? ... two recent trends offer some hope: the rise of podcasts and digital video...
journalism and democracy are, in fact, names for the same thing... both forms of a public conversation.