The November History of Media Studies newsletter is out, with updates about the journal, new bibliography additions, and CFPs! buttondown.email/hms/archive/...

A pro-affordability, anti-Trump-corruption message unites the party. Every candidate can run on that, and every candidate can have their own take to fit that to their constituents. There's really no need to find fights to pick when the party agrees on more than it disagrees

“ ‘A lot of academic research on AI currently is also funded by the AI industry, which creates the risk of distorting scientific knowledge.’ ”

The New York Times continues the decades-old effort to divert anger against the rich into generational conflict. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/17/o... Insofar as young people have it hard today, it is because we rigged the economy to give the rich all the money, not because of baby boomers.

The October History of Media Studies newsletter is out, with updates about the journal, new bibliography additions, and CFPs! buttondown.email/hms/archive/...

Author of ransom note suggests paying ransom is, in fact, pretty good idea.

Check out my latest, this time for Time magazine’s Made By History series: time.com/7318570/cbs-...

Thank you, UPenn AAUP, for your powerful response to the administration's "invitation" (correctly renamed "threat") to join their academic compact. #academicfreedom #defendhighered @aaup-penn.bsky.social @aaup.org

This is the biggest attack on free speech since the McCarthy era but it also has significantly less popular consensus behind it than the second Red Scare. It's being done on behalf of a minority faction led by the most unpopular president in modern history. Organizing against this can win.

You've got to love #openaccess for books (if you can fund it). Now ~19,000 downloads for A History of Scientific Journals: publishing at the Royal Society 1665-2015. Unbelievable figures, compared to traditional academic book publishing! From @uclpress.bsky.social or www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv...

In Project 2025, Brendan Carr [current the FCC Chairman] wrote "The FCC should promote freedom of speech... [and] pro-growth reforms that support a diversity of viewpoints." (p.877).

I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose??? This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

How to delete your account without agreeing to the new TOS: In the dialogue box asking you to agree, DO NOT click agree. Instead, click on the TOS link which will open another tab. In the top right of that tab you can go to your account settings and delete your account.

Essential reading: “AI Scraping of OA Content Warrants a Collective Response” doi.org/10.21428/ae6... from @punctumbooks.bsky.social

What might seem like a small announcement—it’s just one institution—actually carries substantial weight and has a strong symbolic meaning. @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social, has taken another bold step: it won't renew its Web of Science license. www.uu.nl/en/news/acce...

THEY VOTED TO RESTORE THE IMLS FUNDING. This isn't the end. It's nowhere near the end. But the House and Senate subcommittees voted to restore the IMLS in their budget markups. Full House budget markup is tomorrow.

Read and weep... and then begin planning for building something entirely new out of the ashes.

🎙️ Check out my conversation with @petecant.bsky.social about the #MediaTravels collection! We discuss the need for all media studies to be global media studies, the barriers to achieving this, and the value of embracing partial and fragmentary knowledges. newbooksnetwork.com/media-travels

Received the print copy of my book (out next week!). Obligatory shot with @theul.bsky.social in the background.

The August History of Media Studies newsletter is out, with updates about the journal, new bibliography additions, and CFPs!

Saddened to hear of the passing of Dr. Rossiter, who told the stories of the many forgotten and underappreciated women of science. Like many women of her generation, she survived academia by developing a tough exterior, but her support for jr women, myself included, was unwavering. RIP, Margaret.

Thank goodness for the Internet Archive. I'm so glad it exists—it's such an important tool for truth and for memory, especially at this moment. (This particular rant brought to you by finding that a report was deleted from the CDC website but is, thankfully, preserved in the Internet Archive.)

My lab's been attacked by an anti-wind group and their lawyers. They threatened the science funding of my whole university, to shut me and my undergraduate research assistants up. NYT just covered it. 1/n www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...

An open letter of resignation from myself and many other book series editors at Amsterdam University Press, following its recent acquisition by the notoriously exploitative academic publishing conglomerate Taylor & Francis.

Culture Machine is happy to announce Vol 25 (2026), University as Infrastructure, will be guest-edited by Alexandra Anikina, Johannes Bruder, Megen de Bruin-Molé, Stephen Cornford, Kwame Phillips & Geoff Cox. Read the full CfP at Culture Machine’s website: culturemachine.net/vol25-cfp-un...

There's a lot of focus on the strategy by publishers of accepting more papers to receive as many APCs as possible, but they also hope to pay for as little labour as possible to process these papers. So you end up with academics doing more production work, more outsourcing and now lots of AI.

"In the face of government strong-arming, profit-seeking media organizations predictably sacrifice their journalistic principles rather than jeopardize their commercial interests." Read @victorpickard.bsky.social's newest article on the implications of Paramount's settlement with Trump:

Wow, the film/media/comm list of AUP was sold to Taylor & Francis (huge conglom that makes $$$$ on research that we do on our own dime, submit for free, revise for free, review for free, and pay for OA)- a bunch of editors promptly quit & I suspect more are forthcoming. Good for them

Straight out of Viktor Orbán's playbook: Weaponize media law and policy, exploit oligopolistic ownership structures, threaten profits -- any tool at Trump's disposal that can be deployed to beat media institutions into submission. His final goal is for all media to look and sound like Fox News.

From Ezra Klein’s interview last year with Oren Cass: Just to be clear: nothing changed, there has been no “factional struggle,” and JD Vance, like Trump, has consistently supported traditional Republican priorities that harm the working-class.

For all of the voluminous punditry about the possibility of new worker-friendly Republican Party, Trumpism marks not just a continuation but an acceleration of the GOP’s multi-decade class war from the top down. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/b...

Paramount just paid Trump a bribe for merger approval. When Democrats retake power, I’ll be first in line calling for federal charges. In the meantime, state prosecutors should make the corporate execs who sold out our democracy answer in court, today.

Remember the “reformicons,” who were leading the party away from “tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the rich”? It beggared belief even before the election in 2016 that the GOP was going to embrace this program, but the grift is now nearly a decade old and still given credence by the media.

Bernie Sanders: “It is obscene to give tax breaks to the top 1% by throwing more than 16 million people off health care, cutting nutrition for hungry kids and making it harder for working class young people to go to college. That is exactly what Trump's budget reconciliation bill does.”

“It’s the largest redistribution from poor to rich in a single bill in American history.” It's a play in three regressive parts: 1. Tax cuts for the rich. 2. Spending cuts on the poor. 3. Tariffs that hit low-income folks hardest.

In more tales of strange governance, Knowledge Unlatched moves BACK to not-for-profit status, living with Annual Reviews. My hot take: this is good. But now AR should cement a constitution that ensures NFP operation and community governance cc @samuelmoore.org www.annualreviews.org/pb-assets/as...

“This is the most corrupt FCC in the agency’s history,” Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy at Penn, told The Nation. “What we’re seeing now is outright Mafia-style behavior where the FCC is trying to shake down corporations and entire industries to carry out Trump’s agenda.”

“In its drive to embrace AI, Google is further concealing the raw material that fuels it, demoting links as it continues to ingest them for abstraction,” @jwherrman.bsky.social‬ writes. The company is “starving the web that supplies it with data.” nymag.com/intelligence...

Not sure how I missed this excellent, taxonomically satisfying overview of OA business models, published last year in @uksg.bsky.social Insights

Consider submitting a book proposal to mediastudies.press, in our annual proposal window (June 1 to July 31). We are a nonprofit, no-fee, scholarled publisher supported by libraries https://www.mediastudies.press/proposals

Zucman and co were proven exactly right—extreme wealth inequality makes democracy and the rule of law untenable. A global wealth tax is probably the most pro-democracy policy out there. www.ft.com/content/859e...

This should be fun: camri.ac.uk/50-years-of-... Today: chatting 50 years of UK Media Studies with Christine Geraghty, Graham Murdock & Peter Golding. Tomorrow: giving a paper on Encoding-Decoding at the Open University. And a real piece of media history: there's a conference hashtag! #UoWMEDIA50

WOW - how do these people lie straight in bed at night? IEEE is charging a 'Repository License Fee' (or should that be 'FEEE'?) "The RLF price is $1,275 for periodical articles and $400 for conference articles and is applicable only to AMs and not to VORs." bibliotheek.ehb.be:2580/repository-l...

New open access books published in 2025 in my book series Critical, Digital and Social Media Studies: Vincent Mosco: Critical Communication: A Memoir, doi.org/10.16997/boo...

🤖 How can academic communities regain control over AI in knowledge production? New report by Open Future fellow @samuelmoore.org explores governance strategies for the "scholarly commons". Read more ⬇️ openfuture.eu/publication/...

l'Université de Lorraine has reallocated the funds freed up when they stopped subscribing to Wiley's journals bundle, enabling univlorraine.bsky.social to increase its #scienceouvert contributions to €134,000 or 7% of the university’s subscriptions budget. scienceouverte.univ-lorraine.fr/en/home/

New episodes of the @annenbergcargc.bsky.social Global Media and Communication podcast out this month featuring research from two brilliant Mexican scholars!

Check out my latest for @opinion.bloomberg.com! Talking Trump’s defunding of CPB and his paltry understanding of American “greatness.” www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

My most explicit attempt to think through ways of approaching the labor situation I'm pointing to was my report for @investinopen.bsky.social on how to approach the analogous situation of the labor necessary for open infrastructure projects. hackmd.io/@investinope...

The effort, led by moonlighting university librarians, has become a battle over the raw ingredients of knowledge, say those who value it. www.sfchronicle.com/us-world/art...