Uncharted homeland territory

Disrupted: The politics of belonging David Brooks, in the New York Times this morning – October 31st, 2018: “What you see is good people desperately trying to connect in an America where bonds are attenuated — without stable families, tight communities, stable careers, ethnic roots or an enveloping moral culture. There’s just a whirl of …

The Planet and the Donald

A New York Times opinion editorial, April 20th 2017: Will we recover from the Trump presidency? Perhaps not: The thing with climate change is we don´t have much time, and not much is happening — so what happens when what little is happening gets reversed?  “President Trump’s environmental onslaught will have immediate, dangerous effects. He has …

Fresh Air Radio — on a Saturday

It´s the economy, stupid: Bill said it–did Hillary listen?Sometimes you wish Bill was back, but there´s another story I have in mind right here: Not the story of how Hillary Clinton failed to take Bill Clinton´s most important piece of insight with her into her own presidential bid. Not, the story of how her failing …

A lecture on global journalism

Connecting journalism to global development Journalism is undergoing changes spurred by media technologies. Media ubiquity is reshaping much of our thinking about cultural and political development. From this point ov view we may want to revisit some of the classics in the study of the media and modernizaton — that is the confluding thought in …

Leaning on a class to make sense

Every fall semester I teach one of my classes in English, with about 20-30 foreign students visiting our university for a semester. We had our first meeting yesterday. And as always I wonder before class starts whether there is enough in the chosen lecture theme to get them out there on the floor, debating. They …

The future and the future of journalism

Understanding the globalization of journalism entails reflection on a wide range of factors – not just factors shaping journalism as such, like the coming of social media and the so-called “sharing economy”, with Google stealing alle the advertising with a smarter scheme. Discussions are found everywhere concerning these aspects of the future of journalism and …

Terrorism, attention and the media

What determines news coverage and how does it apply to terrorism? The idea that terrorism is PR and journalism has a dramaturgical quality is an idea with a long history, but also a history made extraordinarily relevant with the attacks in the US on September 11th 2001, resulting in the epic, metaphorical – and also …

Globalization – a challenge for journalism

  What is the idea of global journalism and the critical discussion all about? Why spend time researching and critiquing something that seems both inevitable and general, vast complex and subject to a myriad of interpretations? Journalism has been going global for centuries – it has been in the DNA since invention: Yet, it seems …

On the life and death of innovation

Listen to Robert Gordon talk about the future of growth and innovation – or the lack of it. This TedTalk, from February 2013, presents an argument that the US economy has been expanding wildly for two centuries, but is now slowing to a halt, if not a stop. Are we witnessing the end of growth? …