futurejournalismproject:

The History of News in Five Minutes

We sat down with NYU Journalism and Mass Communication Prof. Mitchell Stephens to talk about the news — why we share it, how we’ve shared it, and what it is today. 

We’ve come full circle, he says, from marketplace conversations being a main news source in agrarian and preliterate societies to today’s personal newsfeeds and amateur-led sharing. We relied on each other to share news before large organizations and reporters packaged it for us, and we are beginning to rely on each other again with the internet. We are freer now to make the news about our lives than ever before and that, he says, is mostly a good thing.

For more information, see his books A History of News and The Rise of the Image the Fall of the Word. We’ll upload more of what he had to say over the next few weeks.

Makes one wonder what the next five minutes will sound like…