One of the smartest and most sensible social scientists writing about journalism and the news is Michael Schudson. He has a piece in the Cuadernos de Información (N°19, 2006) which is published by the Communications Faculty at Santiago’s massive Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. It’s called The Anarchy of Events and the Anxiety of Story Telling.

Let’s be honest, with a headline like that you’re not going to click on the link.
Academic titles seem designed to put off general readers. OK, any readers. In case you think it all sounds horribly inaccessible, you couldn’t be more wrong. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Media critics often urge journalists to be more attuned to long-term social forces and less obsessed with the events of the past 24 hours. I admire long-form journalism, the analytical piece that takes a deeper look, but at the same time I believe the event-centered-ness of American journalism is one of its saving graces: events are one of the things that prevent both states and markets from taming and controlling the news.

Accessible, intelligent – worth reading.

I’m not one of the smartest social scientists etc., but it’s an old journalistic trope to imply authority by association, and you can’t blame me for trying.

I also have in essay in that edition, defending journalism against the charge that it oversimplifies things, it’s got the equally populist title Time and Media reductionism.

Here’s a quick clip:

A quick look at a typical time use survey will give you a pretty good idea of what people are actually doing with themselves. Americans, for example, are engaged in TV-viewing for two hours and 38 minutes a day. Reading takes 23 minutes. Socialising takes up nearly 45 minutes a day, active leisure accounts for just 18 minutes. In case you wonder what happens at weekends, people do a lot more TV-watching, and a little more sports and socialising.

If we want people to consume more news, we have two broad opportunities to influence them in their free time: through their TV consumption or through their twenty minutes or so of time devoted to reading.

For people who don’t need the benefit of Google translate to read Spanish (not me I’m afraid), it’s beautifully laid out here in pdf format.