CT No.260: News has no memory

Previously in The Content Technologist: Techno-optimism vs. legacy media. A history of impressions. How transformers process language and memory. Local media succeeds at telling local stories. The news audience, as processed by Palantir.Rethinking our memories of recordAn American news story, in its purest form, has no memory. Its provenance is both in its sourcing of human intelligence and in its observation of either situation or review of documentation. An American news story stacks facts but keeps no score; builds a narrative but predicts no future; guides judgment but obscures the narrator. If life is a rich, intricately woven tapestry, a news story is an intermediate crochet pattern hastily executed, loosely hooked. It stands alone, like the cheese, sweating in the heat until you have to throw it out. An American news story is an ephemeral commodity, borne of 20th century manufacturing, designed and refined over time to wrap fish and make pulp.In the newspaper and broadcast…