![]() In 2004, “one of the last normal years,” she said, the U.S. “And if there’s no longer a paper that covers you, that’s a news desert.” “They’ve been downsized to ghost newspapers,” Abernathy said. That’s exactly what happened in California to the century-old Oakland Tribune and the Contra Costa Times - along with a number of San Francisco Bay Area weeklies - after Alden took over Digital First Media. “The Chapel Hill (North Carolina) weekly is now nothing but an edition - a one-page insert - of the Raleigh News Observer,” Abernathy said. Some of the ghost newspapers are publications that have shut down and become a single page that appears once a week in a larger newspaper, miles away from the action. Not only has her prediction come true, but it’s manifested in these ghost newspapers - bare-bones entities that, due to drastic downsizing, now cover a fraction of the issues they once did. ![]() “If you think how many papers have been merged or downsized into nothing, that leaves a hole in where people get their news,” says Abernathy, author of “ The Rise of a New Media Baron,” a 2016 University of North Carolina report that described the profound impact that hedge fund ownership of newspaper chains is having on coverage. Now Abernathy says news deserts are on the rise, fueling concerns about the lack of watchdogs and oversight in communities large and small across the U.S. And it conjures perfectly the legacy of hedge fund Alden Global Capital as it pillages the Digital First Media chain. The bleak metaphor is a reference to pared-down-to-nothing papers (or even single-page inserts) that are the remnants of once-robust local publications. Now she’s added a new expression: Ghost newspapers. Ma– It was probably Penelope Muse Abernathy who put the term news deserts into our lexicon, predicting two years ago that large swaths of the country would soon be left without a reliable local information source. Glimmers of hope as some hedge fund owners get out of the news business Kathy High, Professor of Video and New Media, is an interdisciplinary artist working in the area of technology, science and art.Shuttering papers and turning them into weekly inserts is accelerating the rise of news deserts, researcher says ![]() She produces videos, photographs, writings, performances and installations about gender and technology, empathy, and animal sentience. In the last ten years she has become interested in working with living systems, animals and art, considering the social, political and ethical dilemmas of biotechnology and surrounding industries. Her most recent art works include a video documentary about green or natural burials, entitled Death Down Under and a performance/visual arts project called Blood Wars that uses white blood cells to test an individual’s strengths (see ). These projects have allowed High to investigate areas such as decomposition and the immune system. High is also a scholar of the history of video technologies, systems and video art, and has a background in both writing and publishing (see for reference to a video art journal, FELIX, founded and edited by High in 1990s-2003). Her co-edited book The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued, with Sherry Miller Hocking of the Experimental Television Center, and Mona Jimenez of the Moving Image Preservation Program at NYU, on the history of video imaging tools will be published by Intellect Books (UK) in 2013. This text is the culmination of seven years of research into the histories of video imaging tool production in the USA. ![]() The book presents stories of the development of early video tools and systems designed and built by artists and technologists during the late 1960s and 70s, and how that history of collaborations among inventors, designers and artists has affected contemporary tool-makers. ![]()
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