A needier media

The ongoing lament of the out-of-touch political class

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks talking with people in various branches of the media—journalists, editors and the like—about the state of the industry and I’ve also been reading recent research on news consumption. I have been following closely the debates around the way in which the Presidential candidates in the United States are using legacy and non-traditional media as part of their campaigns, and what those arguments are telling us about the state of play.

The very idea of what “media” and “journalism” even are these days is what I have been trying to get my head around, and I am increasingly convinced that 99% of the headline discussions about these matters are misleading, mired in a fundamental misunderstanding of how media today actually function.

This was brought home to me when I read this article about regulating AI, which makes the point that ‘“AI” is an unscientific, over-simplified label for evolving applications of computing. The applications we call AI are so numero…