Reinventing the Feature Story: Mythic Cycles in American Literary Journalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Start, Paul. The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. New York: Basic Books, 2004. 484 pp. $27.50 Research in mass communication, especially studies focused on journalism history, typically concentrate on an individual event, sometimes a series of events, and occasionally a window of a decade or more. And, just as typically, media historians take as subjects the works, lives, and innovations of individual journalists, advertising agents, or public relations professionals; the rises, falls, and impacts of particular media institutions or journalistic trends; the coverage of a particular war, political event, politician, or social movement; or the influence of individual and institutional efforts to influence journalists' work. Periodically Willard Bleyer, Alfred Lee, Frank Luther Mott, Edwin Emery, or one of their successors cherry pick these focused historical studies and the trade journals for chronicles of American journalism history-textbooks of partial, selective, and disconnected constructions of history that never quite satisfy teachers and students in media history courses. On occasion, however, a scholaroften separated from the lore of journalism and mass communication practice, study, or history-examines afresh communication history to synthesize trends in journalism in the context of broad social, economic, political, and philosophical patterns. Harold Innis offers an example; this Canadian economist, with a broad brush, established in Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communication two central tendencies of mass communication as corrosive to local communities and cultures and fundamental to nations, imperialism, and modern commercial concentration. The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications by Princeton Sociology professor Paul Starr, similar to the work of Innis, offers teachers and students another important synthesizing study of mass communication. Although Starr concentrates on the evolution of U.S. communication, he does so while continuously comparing development of U.S. media systems under democratic liberalism to those systems that evolved in nations and empires adhering to more feudal and authoritarian notions. Essentially Starr argues the characteristics of today's mass communication systems derive from political philosophy in place in nations and empires when modern communication technologies first emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".