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This epilogue provides an update on MSNBC and NBC News's footprint in the distribution of online television news since their acquisition by Comcast, with particular emphasis on the restructuring of MSNBC.com into an expanded NBC News Digital and the creation of an entirely new website for the MSNBC cable news channel. It discusses other changes at MSNBC, including the rebranding of the Blue Site as NBCNews.com, the creation of a new MSNBC.com based on the open source content management system Drupal, and the use of the “Newsvine 3.0” commenting system as the basis for all the community features on the new site. Despite some changes that seem to show the influence of a centralized management and hierarchy, complex assemblages of system builders remain both inside and outside the MSNBC organization. Heterarchy is alive and well within MSNBC's constellation of companies and teams.

This introductory chapter briefly examines the practices, institutions, and implications of newsmaking at a time that is equally imprinted by the hegemony of neoliberal politics and worldviews brought about by the diverse institutionalization of digital communications technology. News journalists of today are engaged in the process of redefining their senses of agency, expertise, and authority given the new ecology of forces. The chapter suggests that digital news is an interlinked constellation of differently scaled nodes (organizations) that interact via variously sized and speeded channels to connect a galaxy of newsmakers and news users. It concludes with a discussion of the methods used in the book's study and an explanation of why Germany was chosen as the center of study.

This chapter examines the use of platforms such as Twitter to link to news articles about favored political issues and argues that the selective sharing of journalism on social media positions citizens in a public relations–like capacity, helping raise awareness for some truths and narratives over others. In the contemporary environment of information surplus, the grassroots curation of news serves as an entry point for citizens to participate in agenda-setting processes that are subtly, yet undeniably, persuasive in intention. The increasingly partisan character of political information itself, from ideologically charged news and satire to activist-oriented citizen journalism, fuels the marketing-like orientation of citizens who publicize and promote this content to peers. The chapter concludes with an analysis of for-profit news sites that depend on social sharing for their financial livelihood and addresses broader risks of political trivialization as journalistic content is shaped to “go viral” across like-minded peer networks.

This chapter considers changing perspectives of modern time. It argues that newspapers are stuck in late-nineteenth-century modern time, raising complaints and objections to the new time regime. In contrast, television news is mired in mid-twentieth-century modern time, and the web editions of legacy media, after a moment of turbulence, returned to reflect the modernist time of an institutional memory they share. New interactive and mobile technologies create for news media a space of temporal discomfort. The modern sense of time empowered practitioners, giving them clear tools for selection and sequence, the discipline of deadlines, and the competition of the scoop and the exclusive, with the underlying assumption that time is money. The new sense of time removes their illusion of some control in a political life formerly attuned to their own news cycles.

In news organizations today, editorial strategy is business strategy. The two are entirely intertwined. Understanding either requires studying both. With the shift to digital, the process of publishing the news has transitioned from a series of loosely coupled, sequential, and periodic production tasks to a set of complex, overlapping, and stochastic outputs requiring significant alignment and coordination to succeed. For journalists, these changes are challenging newsroom norms and driving an embrace of human-centered design practices and product thinking. For academics it is an opportunity to study the remaking of organizational roles and relationships in the business of digital news, an effort that is still in its infancy.

This chapter analyzes the impact of online news on news reporting. In the first decade of the 2000s, the “what” in accident, crime, employment, and political stories first began reporting more events in stories, reversing decades of declines. But by 2010, the references to current events within stories had declined to the levels of the 1990s, with political stories concentrating even more than other topics on a single current event. The changes in the “what” echo earlier patterns of modern news, when practitioners responded to then-new technologies by reverting to established ways. Online, the news outlets again moved together, a pattern that suggests a missed opportunity. News practice might have escaped from conventional constraints, pushing to a linked perspective on what happens. The general public was using interconnectivity to cope with the flow of information in the new century, a third of them sharing news stories on social media, half relying on word of mouth, and more than three-quarters using email links. Instead of finding ways to stay in tune with public habits, news practitioners pushed back, closing ranks around modern truth.

Homelessness is presented in the British media through the lens of a stereotype: the words alcoholic, drug addict and gambler, accompanied by an image of a dishevelled, usually male, figure in a doorway, sitting on cardboard with a begging bowl and looking broken, sad or desperate. It is explicitly designed to elicit an emotional response from the reader, listener or viewer, but at the same time, to explain the causes of homelessness. The problem, though, is it also allows for people to draw conclusions, apportion blame and produce ‘othering’. The tropes are repetitive and inevitable. The notion that this situation could never happen to me is fully embedded in society. ‘I’d never drink/gamble/drug my way to homelessness’ comes the cry of resistance, but ‘we can pity the homeless, help out, but not really concern ourselves with the issue because it’s not a problem we are ever going to face’. In this next chapter I am going to draw on my own experience of long-term homelessness to demonstrate how damaging this stance from the media is. Not just to those who suffer homelessness, but how it impacts on societal perception at large and in turn how this affects government and public policy. To end homelessness you have to change the media narrative entirely. The following explains why change is needed and how to do it.