Looking for Student Blogs

It's fall, and once again I'm looking for links to blogs being written by student journalists. If you have one, or know someone who does, drop me a note!

Dr. H

Friday - Sept. 29, 2006

Media News Round Up
Facbook privacy, Kerry and the media, and the little robot that could.

• Facebook Is About Making Money, After All Dept. - Will News Feeds Have Viral Ads?
  Facebook is all about knowing what your peeps are up to, right? But how much do you really want everyone to know about what you do at the social networking site? Users answered a big part of that question a couple of weeks ago when they rose up with one voice and complained about a new news feed on the site. This week privacy hit the fan again for Facebook. MediaWeek was reporting that Facebook was planning to add banner ads to the news feeds, and supposedly that the news feed would tell who clicked on the banners, and put clickers together in new groups. Then came the word that the MediaWeek story was wrong. Hmmmm..... Maybe, or maybe the trial balloon by Facebook just didn't fly. (TechCrunch, by way of Online Media Daily)
  
• John Kerry Gives His Thoughts On "The Media"
  Sen. Kerry was on C-SPAN earlier this week and gave his thoughts about the media today. Overall, he thinks the media are being too complacent, which he blames on the increasingly concentrated ownership. (Fishbowl DC)
• Because I Can Dept. - Opportunity Continues To Explore Mars 21 Months After Landing
  So the Opportunity rover on Mars has nothing to do with mass communication.... Sue me! It's cool. The twin Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity have functioned well beyond their design parameters and for far longer than anyone would have expected. They were designed to operate for approximately three months. Twenty-one months later they are still conducting science on the red planet. R2D2, eat your heart out! (Washington Post)
  
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Thursday - Sept. 28, 2006

Everything Popular Is Wrong Dept: Who's Consuming What?
Oscar Wilde was fond of disparaging popularity even as he desperately sought it. I wonder what he would have made of this round-up of popularity news?

• Jackass: Number 2 Takes First Place At The Box Office
  And people wonder what's wrong with the American cinema! Actually, this may be a sign of what's right. J#2 cost $11.5 million to make and has brought in more than $33 million in less than a week of release. In five days it's earned triple its cost of production. (Box Office Mojo)
• Who Likes NPR?
  Are they a bunch of "Tax-Raising. Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving Left-Wing Freaks"? Well, they are more like than the public at large to read the Times and to drive Volvos. Fun commentary from On The Media's Brooke Gladstone. BTW, do yourself a favor and listen to it rather than read it. (On a more serious note, here's a link to a 2005 Pew study on listeners to radio news.)
• So Do Audiences Like Katie Any Better Than Dan?
  And do we care? The quick answer is that CBS Evening News is doing better with Couric in place. But NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams is still the leader. Me? I listen to NPR's All Things Considered..... (But I don't drive a Volvo and my newspaper of choice is the Washington Post.)
  
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Wednesday - Sept. 27, 2006

Questions Worth Asking (Maybe)

• When Will Boondocks Be Back?
  When will the controversial adventures of Huey, Riley and Caesar be back? Maybe in a few months. Maybe never. Writer and artist Aaron McGruder has been on leave the last six months, and he's given his syndicate no signs that he's returning. Why? In part because he's working on the animated series based on the strip. (Washington Post)
• Have Fashion Models Finally Gotten Too Thin?
  The Duchess of Windsor once famously said, "You can never be too rich or too thin," but perhaps an exception to this rule has finally been found. After all, when a Victoria's Secret model thinks models are getting to thin, they must really be too thin. Concern about overly thin models has gone far enough that the Madrid fashion show banned models who Body Mass Index is below healthy levels. There have been widespread concerns that anorexic images in women's magazines have led to teen-aged girls becoming anorexic, but as Katie Ford of Ford Models points out in USA Today, "The biggest problem in America is obesity." Interesting reading.
• Have "Girls Gone Wild" Gotten Too Young?
  That's what charges against the producer of the popular video series suggest. Apparently producer Joe Francis agrees as he's pled guilty to failing to document the ages of the drunk young women he video tapes lifting up their shirts. (USA Today)
  
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Friday - Sept. 22, 2006

Trends in Media
While I haven't talked about it much here, in my Intro to Mass Comm lectures, I talk about a number of "truths" or long-term trends in the media. I noticed today as I was researching my blog, some prime examples of two of them: "There are no mainstream media" and "Everything from the margin moves to the center."

• There Are No Mainstream Media: Teens Turn To TV & Internet Portals For News
  No surprise that television is the top source of news for teens, nor that the Internet was their second major source of news. What I did find interesting is that teens are getting their online news from portal pages like Google, Microsoft, AOL, or Yahoo. They aren't going to traditional news sites. Why? The news is there when they log on. This information comes from a study called Future of the First Amendment sponsored by the Knight Foundation. Most interesting comment in the story? "'Teens live in a world of user-generated content,' such as MySpace and Facebook." The article goes on to note that as media consumers get older, they tend to migrate to more traditional news outlets. This matches my contention that the "mainstream media" is no longer a particularly relevant concept. There's traditional and new media, but no one medium is mainstream anymore. (USA Today)
  
  
• Everything From The Margin Moves To The Center: Fox News Support National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association
  Fox News was seen as something radical when it got started - cable news being reported with conservative sensibilities. It is now the highest rated of the cable news channels and is seen by many as an alternative to the so-called liberal media. But here's where it gets interesting. Fox News has been supporting the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association's (NLGJA) annual convention for the last eight years. It's not a lot of money ($10,000 this year), but it's the thought that counts. What I find fascinating is that you have two groups here that might be seen as being on the margins of mainstream news - gay culture and explicitly conservative news - and they have been quietly making connections for some time? Why? Maybe because there are plenty of politically conservative gays. (Or perhaps because the group's president works for the New York Post, which is owned by the same company that owns Fox News.) Note, the principle here is that groups at the margin of society become more mainstream through their presence in the media. (It's well worth noting that lots of media companies, from the Chicago Tribune to CNN are also sponsors of the NLGJA.) (New Times Broward-Palm Beach)
  
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Tuesday - Sept. 19, 2006

• To Boldly Split Infinitives Dept. - Star Trek Turns 40
  With every thing else going on, Star Trek's 40th birthday slipped by without mention by me. Few creations have had such a lasting effect in our media world. There were the three short seasons of the original series; seven seasons of Next Generation, seven seasons of Deep Space Nine, seven seasons of Voyager, and a couple of seasons of the ill-conceived prequel series Enterprise.
  
  I will confess that I've probably spent more time watching Star Trek in one form or another over the years than any other television franchise. I will even confess to not only having been to a Star Trek convention as a teenager, but to having created the program book for one. I also have spent two absolutely delightful evenings in the company of actor James Doohan, who played Scotty on the original series. The series (and the accompanying movies) presented a generally optimistic view of the future where humankind survived World War III and transcended our very real differences. Star Trek was the show that would have existential debates on the meaning of being human. The main link here is to an appreciation of the franchise by On The Media's Brooke Gladstone, a self-described Trekker. (Trekkie is hopelessly patronizing.)
  
  As a side note, I have mixed feelings about the announcement that Paramount is redoing the special effects of the original series for a re-release into syndication. I finally bought the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD because George Lucas at last saw fit to release the 70s/80s versions as bonus disks with the Special Editions. (Here's my problem with the SEs.)
  
  UPDATE: I was just sent a link by one of my editors to a site that has fan-generated Star Trek episodes.
  
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Monday - Sept. 18, 2006

Questions Worth Asking (Maybe)

• Was ABC's Path to 9/11 Part of a Vast Rightwing Conspiracy? Or Does Hollywood Always Get Complicated Stories Wrong?
  This issue is being raised by Max Blumenthal by The Nation. I suspect he probably has his answer. The only thing I would note was that when Republicans hated the Reagan docudrama, the show got pulled from broadcast TV and got moved to Showtime. When Democrats hate Path, the show got a minute or two clipped from it. (The 5-hour mini-series did not, however, get particularly high viewership.)
• Is Broadband Video Finally Ready For Prime Time?
  Advertisers seem to think so. But if you want something more than YouTube Gone Wild, DirectTV Titanium service is available for $7,500 a year. You know you want it. (NYT)
• So What's With This Ownership of Ideas Thing? What Is The Real Source Of Dylan's Latest Lyrics?
  Singer and songwriter Suzanne Vega looks at the influence that 19th century poet Henry Timrod had on the lyrics of Bob Dylan's latest album Modern Times. The similarity is startling, Vega says. But she also sees a strong influence of a of a 13th century Sufi poet on one of her own songs. A fascinating essay on the notion of originality, influence and plagiarism. Keep in mind that almost every song today has a link to culture from the past, whether it be in the lyric, melody or chord progression. As the late great Harry Chapin once said at a concert I attended, "Poor artists borrow, great artists steal."
  
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Friday - Sept. 15, 2006

Follow-Up On Starbucks and Plamegate
Here's the latest update on a couple of stories we've been following here. Personally, I'm starting to like the Starbucks one better....

• A Tale of Breasts and Tails: A History of Starbucks Logo
  The Dead Programmer's Cafe gives us a pretty good history of how the Starbucks siren/mermaid went from naughty to nice. She started out based on a 15th century illustration of a mythological siren which is sort of a mermaid with two tails. According to Dead Programmer the Starbucks logo went through several iterations from one almost identical to the 15th century drawing to today's highly stylized image. Incidentally, this history of the logo was written more than a year before the current controversy started!
• Plamegate's Fat Lady Is Singing Dept. - Novak Disputes Armitage's Version of Story
  Columnist Robert Novak, who started the whole world singing about Valerie Plame, accused his primary source (former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage) of distorting how Armitage came to give the Plame story to Novak. Novak made the charges in his column published this week.
  
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Wednesday - Sept. 13, 2006

How Far Does Our Tolerance Of Free Expression Go?
We all know that the First Amendment is supposed to protect us from the government putting limits on our freedom of expression. But that doesn't mean that our land is free of attempts to limit speech at a variety of levels. Here are a few examples taken from recent entries at the delightfully whacky Obscure Store & Reading Room:

• Principal Tells Teachers To Hide Topless Mermaid on Retro Starbucks Cups
  You may not have noticed, but in Oregon and Washington, Starbucks Coffee is celebrating its 35th anniversary by using its original logo on cups. The logo features a drawing of a topless mermaid. (The current logo has the mermaid's breasts covered with hair, Disney-style.) At any rate, a principal at a Kent, Washington elementary school has asked teachers to make sure they keep the logo covered with sleeve if they bring the cup to work. This really isn't a big deal one way or the other to me. What Disney did to the Little Mermaid is far more upsetting to me than a fuss over a Starbucks logo. But what I find fascinating is the level of debate over this story at the Starbucks Gossip site!
• DC Area Teacher Silences Students Using Arabic in 9/11 Presentation
  A substitute teacher in Gaithersburg, Maryland high school was charged with disorderly conduct after she began screaming at a group of students for using the Arabic greeting "assalamu alaikum" in a presentation for Sept. 11. (Washington Post)
• Catholics Protest "Immaculately Transmitted Rash" Comic Strip
  A Catholic group is complaining about a two comic strips that recently an in the University of Virginia's Cavalier Daily. One of the strips portrayed Joseph and Mary discussing an "immaculately transmitted" rash. (Oddly enough, the strip being protested isn't even necessarily the most offensive one on the page!) (Romenesko)
• Boston University Bans Swear Words Along With Racist and Sexist Language In Sports Cheers
  Sports fans who swear, or use sexist or racist chants will be kicked out of the stands, according to a warning from Boston University officials. Rude cheers have been a particular issue at Terrier hockey games. An 18-year-old sophomore at BU told the Boston Globe that the new policy "[is] terrible and an infringement on our freedom of speech. Sports won't be fun anymore."
  
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Tuesday - Sept. 12, 2006

Questions Worth Asking (Maybe) - Sex and Lies Dept.

• So Is It Really An Ad For Rough Sex? Or Just a Chance To Be Humiliated In Front Of The Entire World?
  There's a lot of talk about sexual predators on the net these days, but what about folks who are preying on adults looking for a good time online? Seattle programmer Jason Fortuny ran a fake personal for a pretend woman seeking rough sex on the Seattle Craigslist online classified advertising site. He then took the 200-plus responses and posted them all to his Live Journal. Some of the responses Fortuny posted included explicit photos of the respondee, some responses were mailed from work E-mail addresses, some were from married men. It's one of those cases that sounds like an urban legend, but actually happened. So here's the hot topic of debate: Is Fortuny a sociopath for punking these guys? (After all, it looks like some of them may get fired, and a few others might have some big explaining to do to their wives.) Or is he just giving these poor schmucks what they deserved? (The links I've provided should be work safe, but the links at these sites to the actual prank are emphatically Not Work Safe.) BTW, does anyone out there still remember the stunts pulled by Spy magazine?
• Who Is Lonelygirl15? And Why Are So Many People Obsessing Over Her?
  The online video site YouTube has given a significant number of people their 15 minutes, but Lonelygirl15 seems to have gotten more than her share. Lonelygirl15 has posted a series of about 30 video blog entries to YouTube since June, and they tell the tale of a 16-year-old girl who has repressive parents who belong to some kind of obscure religious cult. Only the problem has been that the videos look way too professional for a home-schooled girl to be producing with a web cam and a PC. And her MySpace account is apparently being run by the Hollywood talent company Creative Artists Agency. Is Lonelygirl 15 a marketing ploy ala the Blair Witch web site? Is she an alternate reality game? Or is she someone's creative experiment? At this point the answer is murky. But I think we can be reasonably certain she is not a 1 6-year-old named Bree who is being home schooled by Satanists.
  
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Monday - Sept. 11, 2006

Stories of Remembrance - Sept. 11, Five Years After
Put aside your politics and the divisiveness that has split our country for a day and remember those who died, those who loved them, and those who told us their stories.

• StoryCorps Collects the Stories of Families of the Victims
  StoryCorps is trying to record at least one remembrance from every family who lost someone in the Sept. 11th attacks. This link is to the story of Monique Ferrer, whose ex-husband worked on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center's North Tower. Along with Ms. Ferrer's story, there are two others included on the page.
  
  StoryCorps is a Library of Congress project that is travelling around the country collecting stories of real life from ordinary Americans. All of the oral histories they record will be stored in the Library of Congress archives. Select stories from the project are broadcast weekly on National Public Radio. Eventually, all of the Sept. 11 stories will also be archived at the World Trade Center memorial.
• The Photojournalism of Sept. 11
  The images of Sept. 11th are stark and impossible to forget. There are the giant, unimaginable images of the planes hitting buildings, buildings collapsing, a field in Pennsylvania, the Pentagon. And then there are the most personal of photos. Richard Drew's desperate image of Norberto Hernandez falling, Thomas Franklin's inspiring image of firefighters raising the flag, or a baby being fed in Brooklyn following the attacks. An analysis of the photos of Sept. 11th from NPR's Day to Day.
• Music for Remembering Sept. 11 - John Adams' On the Transmigration of Souls
  Contemporary composer John Adams won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for On the Transmigration of Souls, his haunting combination of voice, ambient sound and music that remembers the victims of Sept. 11. In an interview posted at the New York Philharmonic web site, he discusses the ability music has to capture our feelings about the unfathomable:
  
  Modern people have learned all too well how to keep our emotions in check, and we know how to mask them with humor or irony. Music has a singular capacity to unlock those controls and bring us face to face with our raw, uncensored, and unattenuated feelings. That is why during times when we are grieving or in need of being in touch with the core of our beings we seek out those pieces which speak to us with that sense of gravitas and serenity.
  
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Friday - Sept. 8, 2006

• Is It Possible To Know Too Much About Our Facebook Friends?
  So it would seem. There has been a large-scale backlash against the college-and-university social networking site Facebook. The controversy surrounded a new feature on Facebook known as News Feed, which tells all your "friends" on Facebook everything you've done on the site. Who you've commented on, who you've broken up with, who you've added as a friend. Why so controversial? Because initially there was no way to block this information from going out. Everyone knew everything you did on the site whether you liked it or not. This quickly gave rise to protests (reported on in this link) that was accomplished through (roll the irony) Facebook groups! As I write this, there is a message up on Facebook with a full apology from founder Mark Zuckerberg admitting that the site messed up. Supposedly there are now full controls on Facebook to control what information goes out. We will see. (While I discovered the updated controls when I logged on to Facebook today, my Google News search shows that, unsurprisingly, the most up-to-date news on this story is coming from student newspapers. Here's a shout out to the Central Michigan and Case Western papers.)
  
  BTW, if you have a Facebook account, you can join the Living in a Media World group!
  
  Here's the full text of Zuckerberg's message to subscribers:
  
  An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg:
  
  We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I'd like to try to correct those errors now.
  
  When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. I think a lot of the success we've seen is because of these basic principles.
  
  We made the site so that all of our members are a part of smaller networks like schools, companies or regions, so you can only see the profiles of people who are in your networks and your friends. We did this to make sure you could share information with the people you care about. This is the same reason we have built extensive privacy settings – to give you even more control over who you share your information with.
  
  Somehow we missed this point with Feed and we didn't build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it. But apologizing isn't enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends' News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.
  
  This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn't made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. And I am also glad that News Feed highlighted all these groups so people could find them and share their opinions with each other as well.
  
  About a week ago I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that's what I believe in – helping people share information with the people they want to share it with. I'd encourage you to check it out to learn more about what guides those of us who make Facebook. Tomorrow at 4pm est, I will be in that group with a bunch of people from Facebook, and we would love to discuss all of this with you. It would be great to see you there.
  
  Thanks for taking the time to read this,
  
  Mark
  
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Thursday - Sept. 7, 2006

Media Business News Roundup
No witty, fun items today. Just lots of news about giants of our media world from USA Today.

• Universal Music Group Makes Top Bid for BMG
  BMG is, of course, Bertelsmann Music Group. UMG has offered 1.6 billion Euros, or $2.1 billion. If the deal goes through UMG would become the world's largest music publisher. (USA Today)
• CBS Using TiVo To Promote New Shows
  TiVo subscribers will be able to watch the pilot of the new CBS sitcom a week before it's shown on regular broadcast television. CBS is taking a stab at embracing new technology rather than pretending it doesn't exist. To me the big question with all of these new distribution channels is, "What happens to affiliates?"
• MySpace Goes After Long Tail
  Fox's MySpace is starting to offer unsigned bands a way to sell their music as unprotected MP3 files. MySpace is trying to take on iTunes with the lowest end of the commercial pool - bands that don't have any other way to sell their music to young people. These are the bands that inhabit the long tail of the music market - i.e. the very many bands that sell a very few songs. (BTW, if you haven't read Chris Anderson's book on media economics - The Long Tail, you need to do so now!)
• Viacom Gets New CEO
  Cable programming pioneer Tom Freston has been pushed out as the CEO of media giant Viacom to be replaced by Philppe Dauman. Viacom has gone through extensive changes in the last year, with the biggest of it being split back into two separate companies: Viacom and CBS. As of Wednesday night, the stock market was not impressed. The change in management comes a couple of weeks after Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone announced that Paramount Studios (owned by Viacom) was severing its production deal with Tom Cruise. While much has been made of the Hollywood politics of the deal, there is at least one argument to be made that declining growth in the DVD market is making studios a little more cautious in their deals with stars.
  
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Wednesday - Sept. 6, 2006

• The Voice Behind the Face - The Most Famous Performers You've Never Seen
  We all know that voice actors like Mel Blanc and Billy West do the voices on 'toons. And major animated films like The Incredibles or Monster House tend to attract top-name talent to do the voices. But when the voices don't belong to the performer on stage, we don't always pay a lot of attention to the person whose voice is getting used. It's easy to forget that in Star Wars' initial release James Earl Jones wasn't credited with the voice of Darth Vader!
  
  The point of all this? There are two new books out by famous voices you don't know.
  
  The first is Marni Nixon's I Could Have Sung All Night. Nixon dubbed the signing (ala Singing in the Rain) for Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady.
  
  But the one that is actually the most interesting to me is Kevin Clash's My Life As A Furry Red Monster. Clash is the puppeteer who has been performing as Sesame Street's perpetual three-year-old Elmo for the last 20 years. (He is also, in case you were wondering, six feet tall and African American.)
  
  These two stories from NPR on Tuesday are fascinating to me because they illustrate how clearly television, the movies (and the recording industry, as far as that goes) create illusions for us. Now we know that a furry red monster is not real, but we do buy Elmo as a three-and-a-half-year-old. And we believed for many years that Deborah Kerr could sing. (Kerr actually outed herself by giving Nixon credit for the singing in King.) But whether it is a cartoon, a puppet show, a musical, or even just a simple movie, our media entertainment is an illusion, not real. Shadows flickering against the wall of our cave.
  
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Living in a Media World Archive