Bloomberg News journalist Mark Bergen will write a book on Google subsidiary YouTube called “Like, Comment, Subscribe,” reports Kia Kokalitcheva of Axios.
Kokalitcheva reports, “Why it matters: ‘It’s a technical and cultural story that hasn’t been told in its entirety yet,’ says Bergen when asked why he chose that particular star in Alphabet-Google’s constellation.
- He adds that people are increasingly interested in understand the technologies that are deeply shaping their internet lives — making YouTube and its video recommendation algorithm prime subjects to dive into.
- YouTube, like its peers, is wrestling with questions of free speech and governance of the internet.
- YouTube is also a potential target of the growing antitrust probes into Big Tech, a topic Bergen says will be a ‘fun question’ to explore through his reporting. (Though he adds he doesn’t believe breaking YouTube off from Alphabet-Google would ever happen.)
“The big picture: Bergen’s book is the latest in a long list of projects in the last year or so chronicling the tech industry’s bad behavior and reckoning with the dark side of its influence.”
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Chris RoushChris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.