Journalism, television, cable, and online media are all evolving rapidly. At the nexus of these volatile industries is a growing group of individuals and firms whose job it is to develop and maintain online distribution channels for television news programming. Their work, and the tensions surrounding it, provide a fulcrum from which to pry analytically at some of the largest shifts within our media landscape. Based on fieldwork and interviews with different teams and organizations within MSNBC, this multi-disciplinary work is unique in its focus on distribution, which is rapidly becoming as central as production, to media work.
About the Author
Joshua A. Braun is assistant professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is an affiliated fellow of Yale Law School's Information Society Project and an inaugural member of the "Culture Digitally" NSF working group on cultural production in the digital age. He lives near Amherst, MA.
Reviews
"As we spend most of our time online, what remains unseen are the ways in which media travel to meet us there. Joshua Braun's brilliant book shows what that takes" – Mark Deuze, author of "Media Work and Media Life"
"Understanding the tremendous transformation now taking place in the news industry requires knowing the nuts and bolts of digital distribution as well as production. Josh Braun shows us what this means in a vivid study of how the people at MSNBC sort and circulate journalists' work as they respond to new competition, technology, and constructions of audience. Read this book and you will never look at television news – or for that matter 'television' – in the same way again" – Joseph Turow, author of "The Daily You"
"Elegantly interweaving past theories and studies with new data, Braun brilliantly dissects the consequences of the sociotechnical structure of distribution systems for who gets to know what and how they know it" – Gaye Tuchman, author of "Making News and Wannabe U"
"Braun opens the black box of how television news today reaches its audiences. Through in-depth fieldwork, he provides fresh insights into the complex diversity of today's media organisations, and makes a major contribution to organizational sociology too" – Nick Couldry, author of "Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice"
"Braun is an original and bold thinker. This book is a tremendous contribution to the study of digital distribution infrastructures and practices, with a focus on contemporary news media that is truly exceptional" – Jennifer Holt, author of "Empires of Entertainment"
"'This Program Is Brought to You By...' is a ground-breaking work that offers an ambitious conceptualization and rigorous empirical study of contemporary multi-platform journalism. This book will define the study of media distribution in the decades to come" – Daniel Kreiss, author of "Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama"
"How do media messages move in the 21st century? Fusing perspectives from science and technology studies and communication research, Joshua Braun takes us a long way towards an answer in this theoretically rich, empirically fascinating study of televisual and digital distribution practices. 'This Program is Brought to You By...' is an essential read for both scholars and citizens looking for insights into our digitally mediated age" – C. W. Anderson, author of "Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age"
"Building on the literature on news production in the digital age, Joshua Braun provides a masterful portrait of news distribution. In an original and readable account of MSNBC's teams and organizations, Braun explores how and why a large legacy news organization develops and deploys content distribution" – Valerie Belair-Gagnon, Ph.D., Executive Director and Research Scholar, Yale Information Society Project, and author of "Social Media at BBC News: The Re-Making of Crisis Reporting"
"In an era of always-on media, it's easy to forget how information reaches our screens – and yet that process of distribution, often following a tangled path through digital intermediaries, is an increasingly central part of media work. Meanwhile, scholars have remained focused on media production and consumption at the neglect of distribution. This book tackles that problem head-on, providing a richly constructed analysis of networked distribution systems and the 'heterogeneous engineering' behind them. Just as important, this book makes a key interdisciplinary contribution – an artful synthesis of journalism and television studies and the systems-focused insights of science and technology studies" – Seth C. Lewis, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota
"A nuanced and enlightening account of the networks defining the future of news – a wonderful contribution to multiple fields" – Mike Ananny, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California
