Chapters 23 & 24
Rolf's Points
(What's mentioned in the book)
Employment statistics:
CareerCast Survey of Jobs, 2015
CareerCast Survey of Jobs, 2018
CareerCast Methodology is here.
On 'the race to the bottom' see Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Henry Holt, New York, 2018), p. 33
On 'slow journalism', see Jennifer Rauch, Slow Media: Why "Slow" is Satisfying, Sustainable, and Smart (Oxford University Press, New York, 2018) and Peter Laufer, Slow News: A Manifesto for the Critical News Consumer (Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2014).
Again I'd refer you to Jackson's convincing manifesto on 'constructive journalism', You Are What You Read.
A book that offers a similar critique of the news media but does not use those labels is Rusbridger's Breaking News.
See Pettegree, The Invention of News, p. 2.
Also Clay A. Johnson, The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption (O'Reilly Media, Beijing, 2015), p.40.
On the size of the global PR industry see The Holmes Report, which puts the size of the international PR industry at USD$ 15 billion.
One PR industry estimate limited to Great Britain puts the figure at roughly the same size.
This would mean the global PR industry was much bigger. This statistic assumes a global turnover of $ 20 billion.
On fake content see Max Read: 'How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.' in New York Magazine, 26 December 2018.
See also Jill Lepore, 'Does Journalism Have a Future?' in the New Yorker, 28 January 2019.
See Yuval Noah Harari for insight into free news in his books and in the Guardian, 5 August 2018, 'Humans are a post-truth species'.
For more on manipulation and propaganda, see Pettegree, The Invention of News, pp. 6- 7. And about historical precedents of Russian news interference, p. 35.
Vale's Points
(What's supplemented when Vale was reading)
This chapter felt like a strong stab at journalists, but really the issue lies in the system. As mentioned in a previous chapter, relevance costs money. And the model that journalism and news reporting is built upon today just doesn't give incentives for accurate and thorough reporting.
Oh yeah bots writing intelligible articles is no longer a new thing:
Humans Need Not Apply
Do you know that bots can compose music too?