Josh Braun
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joshbraun.bsky.social
Josh Braun
@joshbraun.bsky.social
2.7K followers 1.5K following 250 posts
Associate Professor at UMass Amherst studying the civic impacts of media distribution. I work in our Journalism Department and also co-edit the Distribution Matters series for The MIT Press. Opinions mine.

Mastodon: @[email protected]
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joshbraun.bsky.social
Annually, I prepare a list of books undergrads in my Media, Technology & Culture course can select for their final projects. Always fun to assemble and I get kick out of sharing it, too, so here it is! #commsky

Pic of Seth Long's book, my favorite new cover.

umass-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/person...
The cover image for Seth Long's new book, "The Last Mixtape: Physical Media and Nostalgic Cycles." It is a stylized line art image that makes the front of the book resemble the old classroom tape decks so ubiquitous in the 1970s and 1980s, complete with a loaded audio cassette and physical playback buttons. The color scheme is late 70s/early 80s, too, with the body of the recorder in a blue-green color that belongs to the same color palette as avocado wallpaper and appliances. There are similarly retro red-orange highlights. The whitespace is colored to look like aged paper.
August 26, 2025 at 3:54 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
Journal spammers really putting their back into it.

#academicSky
Screenshot of a low-effort spam email with the subject line "Article request notice." The complete body text reads: "Hello, Dear Author Have any manuscripts for publication?"
July 19, 2025 at 7:29 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
U.S. media history is pretty straightforward, honestly.

#commsky
The text reads "At the behest of corporations and trade groups touting its tremendous potential for education, development, and social uplift, regulators cleared the way for radio, only for it to become another aggressive marketing channel predicated on the sale of useless crap." The word "radio" is crossed out and replaced by the word "cable," which is crossed out and replaced with the words "online services," and so on with "the commercial internet," and "mobile internet" crossed out as well. Beneath all the text that's been struck through is the latest iteration: "generative AI?"
April 2, 2025 at 2:59 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
Posting for no particular reason.

global.oup.com/academic/pro...

#commsky #VOA
Cover image from "Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America" by Kate Wright, Martin Scott, and Mel Bunce The cover is red-orange and features an illustration in near-silhouette. A man in a suit is running frantically out of frame as a giant arm reaches out to drop a bird cage over him.
March 18, 2025 at 2:26 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
Now that sounds like an amazing class! Wish I could take it.
January 29, 2025 at 11:29 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
January 24, 2025 at 6:56 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
My department, @umassjournalism.bsky.social, is making the move from that other place. Please #welcome them!

#commsky #umass #journalism
January 23, 2025 at 3:39 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
January 16, 2025 at 9:25 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
It's 1928. The Federal #Radio Commission has just been formed and America's airwaves are a morass of largely unregulated broadcasters. The FRC must decide which are providing quality content.

Commissioner Henry Adams Bellows, already exasperated, laments the thankless nature of content #moderation:
From page 215 of Erik Barnouw's "A Tower in Babel:" > How could one rightly weigh, as Commissioner Bellows asked with appropriate desperation, “the conflicting claims of grand opera and religious services, of market reports and direct advertising, of jazz orchestras and lectures on the diseases of hogs?”
January 5, 2025 at 8:50 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
What’s your energy going into 2025?

#FilmSky #NewYear #BusterKeaton #NewYearVibe
December 31, 2024 at 5:42 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
Officially on sabbatical!
December 21, 2024 at 10:54 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
You know it!
December 21, 2024 at 7:48 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
Finally. Finished. Grading.
December 20, 2024 at 8:05 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
Recently finished the wonderful book, "Camera Man," and — just saying — I would be first in line to buy @thehighsign.bsky.social's odd-couple historical fiction account of Buster Keaton and F. Scott Fitzgerald hanging out in the MGM writer's building.
December 15, 2024 at 12:50 AM
joshbraun.bsky.social
Post a movie GIF from the year you were born.
“Hit it” GIF from The Blues Brothers movie.
November 26, 2024 at 1:41 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
Live video of me closing the "Try our new AI tool!" dialogues popping up on all the apps and websites I open.
Animated GIF of a bespectacled bald man in a flannel shirt playing whack-a-mole at an arcade.
November 22, 2024 at 3:49 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
Very excited that @jomc.bsky.social will be speaking with our @sbs-umass.bsky.social Journalism students tomorrow!
Pull quote reading as follows: > These companies have taken over functions of a state without administering the benefits or protections of a state. Nation-states might appear today to be as fragile and theoretical as anything digital, but the difference is not small. Google might secure contracts with the defense department, but the company does not authorize drone strikes. Facebook can’t put you in prison. Apple doesn’t run black sites. Amazon’s foul treatment of its factory workers is iniquitous, but it is not extraordinary rendition. Infrastructure is power, but it is not the law, which means there is still an opportunity for users—as individuals and collectives, and working with government bodies—to hold platforms accountable. — Joanne McNeil, Lurking
November 18, 2024 at 10:03 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
I admit, I wasn't prepared for how useful the responses were. Now I'm struggling a bit with how I feel about the exchange. Here's a sample—the model asked me for an example of one of the principles, on the civic impacts of media distribution, I've been struggling to fold into a conceptual framework:
Partial transcript of an interaction with Claude, Anthropic's LLM-powered chatbot: Josh: Here's just one example. When a particular form of distribution is subsidized or privileged structurally in other ways, the result is that you quickly see producers packaging (or repackaging) their content to take advantage. For instance, the postal subsidies for newspapers in nineteenth-century America resulted in all sorts of content being published in newspaper format, from religious instruction to novels. Claude: That's a fascinating example of how distribution incentives shape content form and genre - almost like a media version of convergent evolution, where different types of content evolve similar "shapes" to fit through the same distribution channel. This principle seems to operate at multiple levels: 1. The immediate tactical level of producers adapting content to fit privileged distribution paths 2. The broader institutional level where distribution systems effectively become genre-making machines 3. A civic level where structural privileges for certain distribution formats end up shaping public discourse and cultural expression This kind of principle suggests an analytical framework that might trace the chain of effects from distribution structures through production decisions to civic outcomes. It also raises interesting questions about the relationship between intended and unintended consequences in media policy - I imagine the postal subsidies weren't necessarily meant to turn everything into a "newspaper," but that emergent effect had significant cultural implications. Would other principles in your list similarly trace these kinds of ripple effects through the media ecosystem? Or do some focus more on different aspects of how distribution systems shape civic life?
November 15, 2024 at 4:40 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
There is never a bad time to read Natalia Roudakova's "Losing Pravda."

But this is a really good time to read Natalia Roudakova's "Losing Pravda."

www.cambridge.org/us/universit...
The cover of Natalia Roudakova's book, "Losing Pravda: Ethics and The Press in Post-Truth Russia." The image is of the loose pages of a newspaper all pinned, in order, along a clothesline strung between trees next to the street. A crowd of people in winter clothing stands in a snowbank along the side of the road, leaning in toward the clothesline to read the newspaper pages.
November 13, 2024 at 5:12 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
❤️
“The UMass Journalism Department firmly believes in the freedom of the press and in the importance of student journalism for informing communities around the country. “We are deeply proud of and impressed by the coverage of the events on our campus over the past week, including the outstanding reporting from The Massachusetts Daily Collegian and WMUA. These student journalists have done exceptional work providing our campus and local communities with valuable and timely reporting during a difficult time. “We want to recognize and thank them for their important work, and believe it is paramount that all student journalists are given a safe environment to perform services that are vital to the public.”
May 10, 2024 at 8:58 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
Pleased to be taking part in this National Academies workshop on April 10–11th, organized by Joan Donovan and Saul Perlmutter: "Evolving Technological, Legal, and Social Solutions to Counter Disinformation in Social Media"

The event is on Zoom and registration is open!

mailchi.mp/nas/disinfor...
Stock image from the workshop announcement. Woman, face partially obscured, reading something on a red smartphone as a wall of glowing, non-descript images drifts by in the foreground.
March 21, 2024 at 4:31 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
When Microsoft ships a #Linux version of one of its apps.
Photo by André Fatras of a man in a penguin suit attempting to blend in amid a flock of actual penguins.
March 3, 2024 at 12:45 AM
joshbraun.bsky.social
Never thought about this, but it definitely explains why I could never get warm when I taught in this classroom. 😂
A black and white stock photo of UMass Amherst’s Herter Hall with students filing past and the library tower looming in the distance. Highlighted with a red arrow is a Herter Hall classroom that is hanging out in space, protruding from the second story of the building.
February 2, 2024 at 1:04 AM
joshbraun.bsky.social
Stumbled across this lovely post by photographer Darren Bradley. It made me feel differently—warm and fuzzy—about our campus #architecture at #UMass, which he describes as "one of the finest collections of Modernist architecture in the United States." www.darrenbradleyphotography.com/post/umass-a...
Photograph by Darren Bradley of the UMass Amherst Fine Arts Center, which he describes as "the most impressive and interesting" example of modernist architecture on the campus. The photo, which is the featured image for Bradley's post, "UMASS Amherst: The Reluctant Modernists," shows one end of the building, a large concrete structure with bold angles that juts into space like an unfinished bridge. A student is passing under the suspended portion of the structure on a broad sidewalk that forks in multiple directions, with green lawn on all sides. Another modernist structure is visible in the background and the whole scene is framed against a blue sky with wispy clouds.
February 1, 2024 at 9:21 PM
joshbraun.bsky.social
🚨 ACADEMIC JOB ALERT 🚨
Full-Time Lecturer in Public Relations | UMass Amherst

UMass Journalism is hiring again, this time in PR! It's a wonderful department filled with colleagues I love. Please spread widely within your networks.

#commsky #pr #OnceMoreWithTheLink
careers.umass.edu/amherst/en-u...
Exterior view of the Integrative Learning Center, where the Journalism Department is housed. The building features multi-floor windows and a jutting contemporary design. Interior view of the Journalism Department's common space inside the Integrative Learning Center at UMass Amherst. Cozy pods of chairs are flanked by digital signage and an interior staircase. The view of campus is visible through the windows in the background. An interior view, from the mezzanine, of one of the entrances to the Integrative Learning Center, where the Journalism Department is housed at UMass Amherst. Moveable seats are arranged in an eye-catching pattern, surrounded by windows. The glass enclosure of the broadcast studio is visible on the right. An interior view of the cafe space on the first floor of the Integrative Learning Center, where the Journalism Department is housed at UMass Amherst. Tables and fuzzy benches stand next to tall windows flanked by pillars. The coffee counter is visible in the background.
January 30, 2024 at 5:14 PM