Tag Archives: 20th Century

Predicting the 21st Century: Nostraslammy’s ten-year review

Ten years ago, at the turn of the millennium, Nostraslammy took a stab at predicting the 21st Century, with a promise to check back every ten years to see how the prognostications were turning out. Odds are good I won’t be able to do a review every ten years until 2100, but I figure I’m probably good through 2030, at

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Why American media has such a signal-to-noise problem, pt. 2

Part 2 of a series; Previously: What Bell Labs and French Intellectuals Can Tell Us About Cronkite and Couric The Signal-to-Noise Journey of American Media The 20th Century represented a Golden Age of Institutional Journalism. The Yellow Journalism wars of the late 19th Century gave way to a more responsible mode of reporting built on ethical and professional codes that

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Why American media has such a signal-to-noise problem, part 1

Part one of a two-part series. From Cronkite to Couric: the Kingdom of Signal is swallowed by the Empire of Noise The recent death of Walter Cronkite spurred the predictable outpouring of tributes, each reverencing in its own way a man who was the face and voice of journalism in America for a generation or more. The irony of all

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What a Difference a Century Makes

A friend passed along this interesting list of US statistics for the year 1905. You can find the list reproduced in several places around the Web, and I have no idea about the original source. For that matter, I can’t swear that any of it is even accurate, although most of it seems about right. Anyway, the point was to

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