Mass Communication: Living in a Media World Watch for the second edition coming Summer 2007 from CQ Press!
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!
Teaching Blogging in the Journalism Classroom Carol Schwalbe is a journalism professor at the Cronkite School at Arizona State, and the students in her Online Media class write a blog once a week for ten weeks. Here are some links to several of her students' blogs from this semester and previous semesters. This is a great project for getting students to start understanding how blogging connects with traditional journalism.
Geeking Out On the Power of Free I am working like a madman on the second edition of Mass Communication: Living in a Media World (coming this summer from CQ Press) right now, so I don't have time to geek out on a series of entries Chris Anderson has written about the economy of abundance and the power of free on his blog The Long Tail.
So here are links to three entries, in order, that deal with technologies, like computer processing power, hard drive storage, and Internet bandwidth that have become almost free. Yes, I know, you still have to pay for your hard drive, but the cost of a megabyte of storage is now down to about 3/10 of a cent; transistors, as part of an integrated circuit, now cost about a nanocent; and Internet bandwidth costs about ten cents per gigabyte. Those are all pretty close to free. Must reading for anyone with the slightest interest in how digital technology is changing our media world.
New Current Event Operas? You may or may not recall that a year or so ago I put together a proposal for an opera based on Plamegate. During the last couple of weeks, a couple of new topical operas have emerged (not by me). Let's take a look:
Mackris v. O’Reilly is the new work by Igor Keller. The oratorio (which is basically an opera without the scenery), is for a 31-piece chamber orchestra, 32-voice chorus and three soloists, directed by Kris Falk.
The libretto is comprised of the original court document and O’Reilly’s on-air settlement announcement. Imagine a two-hour neo-baroque extravaganza including seven chorales, two madrigals, three choruses, four recitatives, two instrumental entrances and numerous arias dedicated to the sexual exploits of the most popular man in cable news.
McSweeney's offers up "fragments" from IF I DID IT! THE MUSICAL You may also recall the fuss from last week over O.J.'s sort-sort-of confessional book and TV interview that ended up getting whacked by News Corp. which finally discovered there really is a depth companies can go to that the public won't follow. McSweeney's offers us "fragments" from a musical based on the case. Here's a sample from a song sung by O.J.'s editor, Judith Regan:
JUDITH REGAN I'll rent us a studio.
We'll talk about that night.
America will see you
In a wonderful new light.
Obviously, we'll also
Use the program to promote
The sale of the tell-all
Companion book you wrote
Remembering the dead
While honoring the living.
It's quite a brilliant stroke.
I'm shooting for Thanksgiving.
Fortunately or unfortunately, this one doesn't seem to be headed into production.
Iconoclastic director Robert Altman died Tuesday night at the age of 81.
He made so many of my favorite movies. This fall I had a bit of an Altman film fest, watching A Prairie Home Companionin the upstairs screen at the Warner Theater, watching The Company on DVD, and listening to the director's commentary on his unequaled M*A*S*H. Sitting on my shelf is the DVD of what I would consider his greatest film, Nashville, one I've been holding onto to listen the commentary, and The Player is working it's way up my Netflix que for a re-viewing.
I was too young to see M*A*S*H in the theaters when it was initially released, and in fact I suspect the first Altman movie I ever saw was the obscure, but excellent, Come Back To The Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. It was an odd film to start watching Altman with because it was one of his "play" films, where he did a straightforward non-improvisational filming of a dramatic play (as was his made-for-tv version of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial).
In edition to the films I've named so far, I would strongly recommend McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park. If you are already a fan, you might have fun with Prêt-à-Porter, but it's not a good starter film.
I'm not up to writing a full appreciation of Altman tonight, so I'll close out this entry with a number of links, and my strongest recommendation to fire up the DVD player or go to a revival house for your own Robert Altman fest. (Clicking on the names of the movies will take you to Amazon to buy the DVDs.)
What I found amazing when I first read the piece several years ago was that most of the people Auletta had talked to had never given the question any thought. Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corp., was the first on Auletta's list. His answer was typical:
"You wouldn't do anything that you couldn't live with, that would be against your principles....It's a very difficult question if you're a man of conscience," Most of his objections were to extreme violence in the movies and to sexual portrayals with "no redeeming social value." And yet he noted that it was almost impossible to set a clear limit, "If you want me to get up and defend every film, every program, I won't do it."
And yet, Auletta notes that Murdoch was irritated by a generally complimentary article in The Economist that said that Murdoch's tabloid newspapers "had contributed to a 'coarsening of British public life.'"
It would appear that this week we got a clear answer as to whether there is anything Murdoch won't do in the media business.
The answer is publish a book by O.J. Simpson on how he would have killed his wife had he done so, and publicize it with a prime-time interview on the Fox Network. Actually, that's not really correct. He did publish the book, and he did schedule the television interview. He only stepped back when everyone from the public, to the family of the people he was charged with murdering, to his own employees at Fox News complained bitterly about how outrageous the idea of the book and program was.
So, what won't Rupert Murdoch do? Anything the public won't stop him from doing. From this point on I don't ever want to hear Murdoch claiming the moral high ground. You can't claim you've done the right thing when your mommy made you do it.
The program is promoting Simpson's If I Did It that will be published by HarperCollins. Fox News, Fox Network and HarperCollins are all owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. On his show Wednesday, O'Reilly said, "For the record, Fox Broadcasting has nothing to do with the Fox News Channel." Except for being owned by the same company, and sharing an executive (Roger Ailes). Details, details. BTW, there is now a Facebook group devoted to trying to get Fox to drop the show. (From Radar, thanks TVNewser)
Interestingly enough, O'Reilly is being joined in his complaints about Fox (and I suppose HarperCollins) by commentators from USA Today, The New York Daily News (no surprise there - the Daily News is a big competitor of Murdoch's New York Post), and the Financial Times of London.
YouTube As A Medium For Citizen Journalism Oftentimes when we talk about citizen journalism, we're talking about some kind of newspaper-like blog that posts reports about hyperlocal issues, such as neighborhood events or elementary school sports. (Yes, I know that's an oversimplification and unfair. But most generalizations are....) Think of sites like the Backfence family. And these provide a valuable alternative to stories carried in traditional newspapers, but they have more in common with the old-time community papers that ran stories about who-had-dinner-with-whom than with cutting edge journalism.
But today I came across two stories about how the YouTube video sharing site is being used to distribute news footage collected by amateurs using cell phone video. Please be forewarned that the video I am linking to here can be very disturbing.
The first example of this I saw was a story in the Washington Post about the abuse of a female prisoner in Malaysia. The woman was arrested on drug charges when an acquaintance of hers was caught with drugs. The police officer recorded the scene as the woman was stripped and forced to do squats, supposedly to dislodge any drugs she was hiding in her body. The officer then shared the video with friends, and eventually it ended up being posted on YouTube. From there, the video was used to bring charges against the officer. The irony here is that the video was not shot by a crusading citizen but rather by the perpetrator of the crime.
I find a couple of things fascinating here. First of all, YouTube was initially developed specifically as a way of sharing cell phone video. Secondly, although we generally think of YouTube as a source of stupid amusement, it can be used as a serious source of news video.
Oddly enough, YouTube actually has a citizen journalism video about being a citizen journalist!
What Constitutes Diversity in the Media? I've written about diversity and the media here on several occasions, talking about Spanish language media, Asian characters on television, dead white women, the Danish cartoons, and disability & illness, among other topics. The issue of how to handle diversity continues to be one the media wrestles with. Poynter's Keith Woods has writtenextensively on how to handle diversity in the news. But for all of this, I rarely see diversity handled in more than a tacked on way.
So I was really impressed with the Washington Post Magazine's "Looks" issue this last Sunday. The editors didn't just make sure they had a range of races represented on the source list; instead, they looked at beauty from a several distinct points of view. They included how a blind man perceives beauty, how a woman with a really big chest deals with how other people perceive her, the challenges of a young Asian man who is constantly mistaken for being Latino because of his curly hair, and an African-American woman dealing with issues of attractiveness, health, and size. Several "must read" articles that deal with diversity and are fascinating to read. They take us places we wouldn't go otherwise. And that, to me, is what diversity is all about.
Election News Wrap Up Pt. II In Pt. I, we looked at some alternative media, let's look at the traditional Big Media and see what they did. Also, Ed Bradley remembered.
RIP Ed Bradley (1941-2006) 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley died of leukemia on Nov. 9 at the age of 65. In addition to be known as a first-ratejournalist and interviewer, he was also a noted jazz radio host. He was fiercely protective of his privacy, and few in the industry knew he was ill with cancer. While he had many firsts as an African American journalist (first black CBS White House correspondent, first black 60 Minutes correspondent), he was memorable simply as a great reporter.
Election News Wrap Up Pt. I So everything's changed with the Democrats taking the House and (narrowly) the Senate. How are the media, in all their varied forms, handling it?
Wonkette Is As Snarky As Ever! While Wonkette is emphatically liberal in its political orientation, its real agenda is making fun of people, regardless of political or sexual orientation. So now that there are actually some Democrats coming into power, there will be bipartisan snarking. I swear that a lot of the charges of media bias came from the fact that there just weren't any powerful Democrats to blame for anything.
Daily Show Rulze Dept. -- Comedy Central Blog Is First To Break Rumsfeld Resignation No kidding - The first "news outlet" to report the Rumsfeld resignation was the Comedy Central Indecider blog, which posted the story at 12:15 a.m. Wednesday. The ever respectable (and one of my first reads of the day) Fishbowl DC credits the first broadcast account to ABC news, but that was at 12:49 p.m., more than 12 hours after Comedy Central's blog report. Of course, ABC cared whether the report was documentably correct; on the other hand, the Comedy Central report was correct in all aspects, down to the timing of the official announcement. Even the ever-serious industry mag Broadcasting and Cable is seemingly crediting the fake news guys. (As is Wonkette, but you were expecting that.) Ever since Jon Stewart called the bluff on cable news blowhard shows like Crossfire back in October of 2004, he and his crew have looked more like news commentators and less like satirists. In fact, for a while back in 2004, he was almost the most talked news personality in the media!
50,000 Watch - What Have Journalists Found 50,000 of Lately? 50,000 - It's journalists' favorite number all around the world! This is a sampling of 50,000 stories that showed up over the last seven days.
Charity Collects 50,000 Pounds of Canned Goods Well, nearly 50,000 pounds, anyway. The claim is that the food came from 3,000 donors, which would mean folks averaged a little over 15 pounds each. That's not unrealistic. (KESQ)
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in the upstairs screen at the 
