This document discusses the crisis facing journalism due to declining revenues, the retreat of journalism into coastal bubbles resulting in some groups becoming isolated from other perspectives, and the risks this poses to democracy like the spread of misinformation and an inability to foresee events. It suggests pre-crisis economic issues that supported corruption remain, alternative online media helped connect some groups, and that some groups now exist in an "information vortex" reinforced by certain media that shields them from challenging views.

1. Journalism in a post-
crisis word
Why we remain vulnerable
to unpleasant surprises

2. Illusion of
normalcy
Warning: not a barometer of
social health
Source: Wall Street Journal

3. Material
incentives
led to
systemic
corruption
Source: Wall Street Journal

7. What Wall
Street tells
itself
Don’t be fooled
Source: Wall Street Journal

8. Pre-crisis political economy endures I
Source: Wall Street Journal

9. Pre-crisis political economy endures II
Source: Wall Street Journal

10. Pre-crisis
political
economy
endures III
Source: Wall Street Journal

11. What was missing?

12. Alternative
media made
the
connection

13. Enter the global
journalism crisis
• U.S. Ad revenues at 1960s
levels
• Circulation won’t make up
the difference
• Newspaper trade group
stopped releasing the
figures in 2012

15. Unforeseen consequence: journalism retreats into coastal bubbles

16. Election 2016 by county

17. journalism crisis, democracy crisis:
coincidence?

18. Risks of losing touch

19. Hungary has an extra dimension

20. Nearing total epistemic
closure
• Dave Roberts: “Conservatives are pulled
with increasing gravity into an information
vortex that simply has no analogue
elsewhere in American politics.”
• Benkler et al.:” Right-wing media (has
become) an internally coherent, relatively
insulated knowledge community, reinforcing
the shared worldview of readers and
shielding them from journalism that
challenge[s] it.”
• Fake news entrepreneur Paul Horner:
• “My sites were picked up by Trump
supporters all the time. I think Trump is in
the White House because of me. His
followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll
post everything, believe anything.”