Media are Evolving – Part II

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

Yesterday I posted a blog entry about how old media are changing to respond to new technology and new demands from audiences.  Today, I’ve got a couple of followups to these stories:

  • Wired’s Chris Anderson discusses “Web is Dead”
    Chris Anderson, co-author of the much talked about “The Web is Dead” article, discusses what the story really is saying with On The Media’s Bob Garfield.  Read or take a listen to this.
  • In the living room, hooked on PayTV
    The NY Times looks at why people are not dropping their cable television subscriptions and making the switch to Internet video.  Simple summary? Cable is easy, online video is hard.  Perhaps the game changing Internet video device has yet to arrive.
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New Media Are Scary Dept. – Media Are Evolving, Not Going Extinct

Posted on August 23, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

We get a lot of proclamations about the future of media, many of which involve the death of one particular medium or another.  For example, a week or two ago Wired magazine ran a story proclaiming that “The Web is Dead.”  The article title is deliberately provocative, designed to get as many people buzzing about it as possible. (You doubt me?  Check out the new “True Blood” cover of Rolling Stone magazine.) The article itself, co-authored by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, is not really as inflammatory as it seems at first glance.  It simply makes the point that the Internet is making the move towards mobile devices, and these devices often depend more on custom apps rather than a general purpose browser for delivering content.

But as good magazine articles generally do, behind all the bluster there’s an interesting premise, which is not so much that the Web (or the Internet) is dying, but rather that it is changing.

And that’s the premise of this interesting article from the NY Times – how old media don’t so much die as evolve into something new.  The casualties, writer Steve Lohr notes, are more means of distribution than content.  He quote Nicholas Neroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab as saying, “Text is not going away, nor is reading.  Paper is going away.”

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Pakistan Floods Get Minimal Media Coverage

Posted on August 19, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

It’s been noted several places that the devastating floods in Pakistan haven’t gotten near the media coverage that the earthquake in Haiti did.  NPR’s Morning Edition had a good story about public opinion about the floods, and it has some interesting coverage about how the media have handled this story.

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Chapter 2 Links

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

Chapter 2. Mass Communication Effects: How Society and Media Interact

Changes in Political Advertising (pg. 42-46)
Political ads can now be independently produced and easily distributed over the Internet. Here are the two examples discussed in the opening vignette for Chapter 2.

Missing White Woman Syndrome – The Lakesha Parker Case (pg. 49-50)
Lakesha Parker, age 33, was murdered by persons back in December of 2005 in an elementary schoolyard in inner-city Washington DC. The murder was caught on a surveillance camera, but but the picture quality is bad because any lights in the area were burnt out. According to Washington Post columnist Colbert I. King, DC school officials took 12 days to replace missing locks at the school and had yet to replace a bullet-pocked door.

According to a search of Google news, the only major published item on the case was by King. A broader search of Google showed a three graph mention in the Post in a crime round up. Say all you want about the differences between Fox and CNN, neither network acknowledged Parker existed.

Interview with composer John Adams (pg. 52)

Marshall McLuhan and Televised Sports (pg. 52-54)
Includes a link to nice bit of YouTube video on McLuhan.

George Gerbner on the effects of television violence (pg. 65)

Political Campaign Ad Examples (pg. 66-67)
Examples of ads from the 2008 presidential campaign.  And several other examples of about media and politics from the 2008 campaign season.

Bias and the News (pg. 67-70)

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Questions Worth Asking (Maybe)

Posted on August 17, 2010 by Ralph Hanson
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Chapter 1 Links

Posted on August 16, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

I will soon have a single page posted with all the supporting links for the 3rd edition.  But until then, I’ll be posting the chapter links as I have them ready.  Here are the links for Chapter 1.

Chapter 1. Living in a Media World

Mount Everest and the Media (pg. 13-14)

Civic Arts interview with Neil Postman (pg. 18-19)
“Television and the Public Decline of Public Discourse”

Web Comics (Pg. 23-24)
Please note that many of these comics will have PG-13 level content.

  • Questionable Content
    This is Jeph Jacques’ incredibly popular web comic, attracting as many as 200,000 readers a day.
  • The Devil’s Panties
    This strip by Jennie Breeden carries the subtitle “It’s not satanic porn.” Instead, it’s a semi-autobiographical comic about the woman who draws the strip.
  • Girls With Slingshots
    “Two girls, a bar, and a talking cactus,” by Danielle Corsetto.
  • Sheldon
    Dave Kellett tells the story of Sheldon, a 10-year-old internet billionaire. There’s a “Sheldon” strip in Chapter 10 in the section about wikipedia.
  • The Abominable Charles Christopher
    Comic book artist Karl Kerschl draws the most beautiful comic ever, about the adventures of an abominable snowman named Charles Christopher.

George Carlin (pg. 32)

  • The Seven Words
    Needless to say, this video contains lots of bad words, given that it’s the “Seven words you can’t say on television.”

  • Of course, Carlin also served as the host of the children’s show Shining Time Station


Generation M: Media in the lives of 8-18year-olds (pg. 36-37)

The Seven Truths, Complete With Web Links (pg. 28-39)

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Link Ch. 15 – Media News from the Muslim World

Posted on August 12, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

When we look at the media world here in the United States, one of the things we understand the least is how media operate in the non-Western world, especially in the Muslim Middle East.  NPR’s On The Media had a great series of stories on media in the Muslim world:

  • Iraq’s Vibrant, Sectarian Media
    In Iraq, there are television stations for every political persuasion: Shiite TV, Kurd TV, Turkmen TV, Maliki TV…. Take your choice.  What there isn’t is a non-partisan Iraqi channel.
  • The Rise of “Satellite Sheiks”
    A rerun of a story from last summer, but it’s still worth listening to. A look at a moderate Muslim entertainer/reporter.  (By the way, Ahmad al-Shugairi says he’s not a sheik:  “Sheik is an Arab word that means like a rabbi, a priest. And I always say in my program that I’m not a scholar and I’m not a sheik. I’m just a simple human being who has hopes for the Arab and Islamic world to improve in all levels, economically, financially, socially. Now, that doesn’t necessarily make me a sheik. It’s just a person speaking his mind out.”
  • Mideast Sitcom Pushes Social Reform
    Who knew that there were sitcoms for the Muslim season of Ramadan?  A look at Tash Ma Tash, a  humor and social commentary program.
  • Al Jazeera Now
    An interview with the director general of Al Jazeera, an independent Arab-language satellite news channel broadcasting out of Qatar.

And now for something completely different – check out the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s comedy series Little Mosque on the Prairie.  (No, I’m not making this up.)

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Truth 7: There Is No “They” Dept. – Dry Erase Girl HPOA Is A Hoax

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

Dry Erase Board GirlThe story breaking on the humor site The Chive was just too good to be true.  Under the headline of “Girl quits her job on dry erase board, emails entire office,” comes a story of Jenny the Assistant who quits her job working for a stock broker named Spencer because she accidentally heard him calling her a “HPOA” on the phone.  (That stands for Hot Piece of… well, you get the message.)  Through a series of 33 photos, Jenny tells of her abuse by her boss and the fact that he spends half his work week playing the Facebook social game Farmville.

The story spread like wildfire over the Web Tuesday. There were a host of Tweets linking to the post at Chive, along with a number of stories, some skeptical, others not so much.  This post from CNET presents it as a presumed legitimate story that might be a hoax, a blog at the San Francisco Chronicle passes on the story, the Huffington Post certainly could have been more skeptical, and Jezebel bought it hook-line-and-sinker.

This morning the news broke that the story was a stunt/hoax/meme from the same pair of guys who had hoaxed a $10,000 Donald Trump tip.  The Chive did the best job of explaining it with a second round of Dry Erase Board Girl. Perhaps the best response came from BuzzFeed about How To Make A Web Meme using re-edited photos from the stunt.  By the way, Jenny the Assistant is actually actress Elyse Porterfield.

As for me, I think this is a great example of Truth 7 – There is no “they.” The initial post on The Chive gave a first name but no last name of Jenny or her evil boss, Spencer.  It didn’t say who her employer was or where her employer was located.  In short, there was an awful lot of “they” going on here.  (By the way, did you know that chives are a kind of onion?  Just sayin….)

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Because I Can Dept: Every Star Wars Lightsaber Ignition and Retraction

Posted on August 10, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

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Is TBD.com the future of urban community journalism?

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Ralph Hanson

All the D.C. journalists and bloggers are hot today about the launch of TBD.com, a TV station and website that puts out local news and community information about the D.C. Metro area. Is this urban community news?

Mashable has an interesting article about TBD that looks how the site is bringing in content from a network of 127 local bloggers.

This fits in well with a blog post by Mark Briggs that I read this morning that suggests that the job situation for journalism grads isn’t as dismal as some folks think – it’s just that the jobs are in managing online communities, not working at newspapers.  (BTW, Briggs is also a CQ press author with the book Journalism Next.)

(I wrote a slightly different version of this post for a community journalism blog I contribute to.)

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