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You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

November, 2011

A Look Back at Fukishima

A look back at the coverage of the Fukushima disaster and media's short attention span.
IEEE Spectrum has a really good step-by-step look back on everything that happened at Fukishima in the hours and days after the earthquake/tsunami. This sort of reporting is really interesting if for no other reason than it's generally really hard to find. For all the coverage you watched and read in the days and weeks that followed the disaster, the dropoff on any story like that happens fast. For all the talk about the public's declining attention span, the media is just as bad. I mentioned this a few years ago, but I still think often about this quote from the 2008 Pew State of the Media report:
Rush Limbaugh’s reference to the mainstream press as the “drive-by” media may be an ideologically driven critique, but in the case of several major stories in 2007, including the Virginia Tech massacre, the media did reveal a tendency to flood the zone with instant coverage and then quickly drop the subject. The media in 2007 had a markedly short attention span.
November 8, 2011
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Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.