Media Instances is a publishing channel that works one instance at a time: a single story, image, or moment, and what it says about the wider picture.
The name is also the method. “Instance” carries three meanings, and the site runs on all of them.
An instance is an example. One case that stands for a class of cases. Most publishing works the other way round, starting from a category and filling it with whatever turned up that week. Here the specific thing comes first, and the general point is whatever that thing can actually carry. Sometimes it carries a lot. Sometimes very little, and the piece stays small.
An instance is an occasion. “In this instance” means here, under these conditions, this once. It’s a guard against the idea that a single case settles anything. A photograph of a market at nine in the morning is a fact about that market, that morning, that light. Anything more is a reading, and the reading should be visible as one.
An instance, in computing, is a running copy of something general. You spin it up, it does real work, you shut it down. That describes what goes on here better than “article” or “essay” does. Each post is a working copy of an idea, running for as long as it’s useful.
What that adds up to in practice is a short piece attached to one concrete thing, with no fixed beat and no obligation to cover a subject just because it was covered last time. Technology, places, objects, markets, pictures. The range isn’t a lack of focus. The focus sits at the level of the individual case rather than the topic.
Photographs published here are original to the site, and many of them are the reason a post exists at all. An image turns up first, the writing follows, and if the writing has nothing to add then the image stands on its own.
Nothing here is trying to be the last word on anything. One instance, then the next.