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Journalism, television, cable, and online media are all evolving rapidly. At the nexus of these volatile industries is a growing group of individuals and firms whose job it is to develop and maintain online distribution channels for television news programming. Their work, and the tensions surrounding it, provide a fulcrum from which to pry analytically at some of the largest shifts within our media landscape. Based on fieldwork and interviews with different teams and organizations within MSNBC, this multi-disciplinary work is unique in its focus on distribution, which is rapidly becoming as central as production, to media work.

“As we spend most of our time online, what remains unseen are the ways in which media travel to meet us there. Joshua Braun’s brilliant book shows what that takes.”—Mark Deuze, author of Media Work and Media Life, “Read this book and you will never look at television news—or for that matter ‘television’—in the same way again.”—Joseph Turow, author of The Daily You, “Elegantly interweaving past theories and studies with new data, Braun brilliantly dissects the consequences of the sociotechnical structure of distribution systems for who gets to know what and how they know it.”—Gaye Tuchman, author of Making News and Wannabe U, “Braun opens the black box of how television news today reaches its audiences. Through in-depth fieldwork, he provides fresh insights into the complex diversity of today’s media organisations, and makes a major contribution to organizational sociology too.”—Nick Couldry, author of Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice, “Braun is an original and bold thinker. This book is a tremendous contribution to the study of digital distribution infrastructures and practices, with a focus on contemporary news media that is truly exceptional.”—Jennifer Holt, author of Empires of Entertainment

Joshua A. Braun is assistant professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is an affiliated fellow of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and an inaugural member of the “Culture Digitally” NSF working group on cultural production in the digital age. He lives near Amherst, MA.