The entertainment industry is churning out recycled relics of our childhoods. Are we really out of ideas? — The last few years have seen an uptick in film and TV adaptations, remakes, reboots, and years-too-late sequels appealing to millennials’ childhood memories. …

Big Tech is always trying to rope us into their ecosystems. The TV market is now dominated by a data-hungry few, as streaming hardware has been absorbed into smart TVs. This breeds a stunning lack of variety. — When shopping for a replacement television recently, I was unsurprised to find that the marketplace for TVs is just as uninventive and monopolized as one might expect. All the top listings carry near-uniform bells and whistles, differentiated only by the handful of Big Tech-branded operating systems they run on. Few…

We’re living in a strange limbo as AI exits geek circles to sweep the public consciousness and private marketplace of everyday normies. Ethics concerns and doomsday scenarios aside, do these things have staying power? — This post originally appeared in my Substack newsletter. Subscribe for more essays. Humans love imagining a future landscape — or hellscape, depending on one’s view — of robots taking over the world à la Terminator. Even so, we’ve already delegated many critical tasks to artificial intelligence, from regulatory paperwork to…

This post was written as part of my Specialized Reporting course at Appalachian State University. In digital media, reporting from outside of newsrooms is commonplace and sometimes required. Thanks to consumer demand for consistent, on-the-go content, journalists now have the means and motivation to do so. I think backpack journalism…

This post was written as part of my Specialized Reporting course at Appalachian State University. As I said in my last post, I will be working on a semester-long project for my senior capstone course in the coming months. My classmate/project partner and I decided to focus on outlandish businesses…

This post was written as part of my Specialized Reporting course at Appalachian State University. Niche media is all about context. Take political news outlets, for example. What about publications that want to cover all facets of the beat, from education to immigration? Or what about those wanting to cover…

This post was written as part of my Specialized Reporting course at Appalachian State University. People like to feel connected to their interests. They reach a sense of belonging when they vibe with like-minded individuals and communities, on and offline. This innate need is something journalism can fulfill through a…