Geographies of News

So much has happened - even in the last week - that it seems slightly frivolous to link to anything less than current, but I stumbled across an interesting passage. In Dean Starkman's Columbia Journalism Review essay about the Future of News, he has a great critique of seeing news as a 'commodity':

Seeing news as a commodity, and a near valueless one (Paton above says its value is “about zero”), is a fundamental conceptual error, and a revealing one. A commodity is the same in Anniston, Alabama, as it is in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Whatever local news is, it’s not that.

It's a bit of a shame to focus only on this passage, as there's a great deal more in the article, but the passage raises interesting questions not only about the value of the news, but also about the ways in which that value is geographically mediated. We might take it a step further to think about the process through which local news events - say, UC Davis - are mediated, transmitted, and reshaped into state, national, or international news items. Or conversely, the kinds of structures that make some news stubbornly local. Interesting.