When asked about his perspective on social issues—gay marriage, abortion— [X] tapped his Bible and said, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’ ”
One of the most significant changes at Arizona State's school was requiring a multimedia class in which each student must write stories, shoot still photos and videos, edit footage and produce Web pages. Lessons from the class will be incorporated into other courses when appropriate.
Talk about a sign of the times in the journalism industry. Staffers at the Longmont Times-Call recently received an internal e-mail inviting them to work as valets at a private Christmas party for the Lehman family, who own the paper. And at least two employees have already accepted the offer.
You're invited to "Blueprinting the Information Valet Economy," a unique, two-day, action-planning session designed to change the landscape for news and information-service providers, artists and publishers. We'll plan, join and start setting up the Information Valet Economy, where companies compete to provide personalized service to users, and make money referring their users to content - and advertising - from anywhere.
Acquiring new information requires particularly focused attention, which includes the ability to ignore distractions. In order to absorb the information contained in a CNN newscast, for example, we must not only direct our attention to the person talking, but also filter out the running headlines, news updates, and financial ticker on the lower part of the screen. Torkel Klingberg, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Karolinska Institute in Sweden and author of The Overflowing Brain, puts it simply: “If we do not focus our attention on something, we will not remember it.” In other words, attention is a critical component of learning.
The map is a sea of red pins, indicating that there are in fact BNP members spread pretty widely across the UK. London is barely visible under the map. Zooming out means that the map can no longer render all the data points adequately. It’s worth remembering that Britain is in fact one of the least racist, most tolerant nations in Europe, but the map looks pretty scary covered in these large red pins.
designed to change the landscape for news and information-service providers, artists and publishers. We'll plan, join and start setting up the Information Valet Economy, where companies compete to provide personalized service to users, and make money referring their users to content - and advertising - from anywhere.
At times akin to group therapy and at other times resembling a business-school class, the summit took shape in three general segments: Specific financial forensics for determining the depth of trouble a company might be in; a discussion of management tactics for leading a company on new paths; and participants trading frustrations, ideas, best practices and suggestions for collaboration.
from what we know so far, this still looks like an industry in denial about how much it must change, with many leaders whose heads are still high on Shein’s crisis curve (below) while their enterprises are much further down.
Six months? What are they thinking? They've laid off more than 10,000 people in the last six months—what will be left six months from now? They need to launch a Manhattan project to blow up their industry and start over. Now, not six months from now.
"We have nothing to lose" is about right, but they may have nothing left to invest in change, either.
Here's my suggestion: drop Monday and Tuesday, consolidate Wednesday and Thursday (for delivery Wednesday), drop Friday, and consolidate Saturday and Sunday (for delivery Saturday). So, a twice-weekly Wednesday and Saturday paper.
(This presupposes, of course, a completely kickass 24/7 online news operation, and a staff that totally gets that online comes first. The web operation should have plenty of blogs, plenty of databased local information, a wiki, social networking features, Twitter feeds, you name it. And it should be ready to evolve and adapt as even more tools and features come along.)
"To show a woman loving a man one should show her cooking a meal for him or opening a bottle of wine for the meal, while she waits for his ring at the door." This paragraph has been on my mind for the days since I first read it; it is a moment again where Lessing reaches to film for a way to apply layers of complexity to a single image (in this case, orange slices). Anna makes this sound melodramatic (he looks the other direction, thinking of something else) but the idea that affection is expressed through everyday chores seems both sad and lovely. It strikes me that the examples Anna gives are all practiced in isolation - the women are alone doting on the men, waiting for doorbells to ring or peeling oranges (while men ignore them). These are very concrete expressions of an abstract capital-L Love.
...as a social operating system, it [Facebook] enables people to build connections in digital space. Unbounded by physical distance or the increasingly imaginary construct of four walls that isolate us, social games on Facebook are bringing people together in new and fun ways like never before.
I built this for me. I built this because I travel a lot. The other people at Offbeat Guides, we travel a lot. We have been pretty disappointed with the gap between the information that is out there in the internet- if you know where to go - and the information that shows up in traditional travel guides. I think that what has surprised me from a business perspective was that there are so many places, conference and visitor bureaus, meeting and event organizers and sponsors, people who want to promote themselves related to travel that were interested in this idea as well.
"You get the truth by not working an hour or a day on something. It takes a long time," said Woodward before the appearance. "There's a tradition in newspapers of digging into things. It's a part of their culture. It's a part of their belief in what we call accountability reporting — really making every power center accountable for what they're doing. I think that's going to live on."
The media’s morbid fascination with the “Second Life divorce” reveals how most media -especially newspapers, even if they also have an online presence- is still trapped in a mentality that understands “the virtual” as opposed to “the real”. (”Second Life affair leads to real life divorce,” said The Guardian). A Second Life affair is no more virtual than flirting over txt messaging, handwritten letters, telephone calls or even a club’s bar. (All flirting is virtual). The “alter-egos” of people on so-called “virtual worlds” or “environments” are still determined by those “outside” the machine. We are those alter-egos, we are the machine.
Traditionalists (46 percent of American adults) rely almost exclusively on traditional media sources (TV, newspapers, radio). This is the biggest audience in terms of population, and also the oldest (with a median age of 52). They make up half of all the adults who read a newspaper yesterday and an even greater share (60 percent) of adults who watched TV news yesterday. They are the most likely group to be poor, retired and not to have completed high school or college.
Integrators (23 percent of adults) name a traditional medium as their main news source but also go online frequently for news. This group is younger (median age of 44), highly educated (almost half have college degrees compared to just 19 percent of the Traditionalists) and affluent (4 in 10 have household incomes greater than $75,000). They get news from many sources and spend the most time with the news of any of the segments. While using online news sources frequently, they also watch TV news as much as the Traditionalists and are even more likely to read newspapers. The core of this group is made up of Baby Boomers, now 44 to 62 and in the prime of their careers.
Net-Newsers (13 percent of adults) say the World Wide Web is their main news source and use it frequently. Not surprisingly, this is the youngest group (median age of 35) and the best-educated (more than half are college graduates). While almost a decade younger on average than the Integrators, they are comparably affluent. They are the most likely to have online access at work and are slightly more likely than the Integrators to have access to the latest technology (home broadband, digital music players and smart phones).
The Disengaged (14 percent of adults) basically express a lack of interest in news. They are disproportionately young, poor (35 percent have household incomes under $30,000) and poorly educated (seven in 10 have a high school degree or less).
(If you do the math, you will find there is another 4 percent of the population who did not name a primary news source or named the Internet as their main source but rarely go online. In terms of their news behaviors, they are probably similar to the Disengaged.
In research the horizon recedes as we advance, and is no nearer at sixty than it was at twenty. As the power of endurance weakens with age, the urgency of the pursuit grows more intense... And research is always incomplete.
By the same token, and proving the prescience of Douglas Adams, I think e-book readers will revolutionize the travel guide sector, particularly as the e-readers develop more functions, and the line between them and hand-held wireless PCs blurs. When Adams was writing, the idea of a single hand-held device that contained all the known information about the galaxy was a flight of fancy - yet things are advancing so quickly now that, rather than being impressed, we’re all given to wondering what’s taking them so long to develop the next generation of software.
“Voice is doing really significant work, driving the agenda on redevelopment and some other areas, putting local politicians and businesses on the hot seat,” said Dean Nelson, director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. “I have them come into my classes, and I introduce them as, ‘This is the future of journalism.’ ”
"In the semantic web, it is not just people who are connected together in some meaningful way, but documents, events, places, hobbies, pictures, you name it! And it is the commercial applications that exploit these connections that are now becoming interesting," John Breslin, the founder of the SIOC project, told Journalism.co.uk.
For example, some publishers are feeding their entire historical archive of material through Calais to be tagged which means it can be filtered and searched more easily. Although these tools aren't of immediate use to most journalists, the scale of this project reveals how many content providers are turning to this technology to make sure their content can be found in the new semantic world.
An Ordnance Survey spokesman told me the real problem was in Google's terms and conditions which allow the search company, in his words, to "reproduce, modify and distribute content that is entered into their maps." The spokesman said talks had been taking place between the OS and Google about changing those terms, but in the meantime, "We won't allow people to overlay our information onto Google maps. We have to protect our information."
Asked if he has become a journalistic cynic, he responded, “That, my friend, is the understatement of the year.” He then quoted a line from the 1987 film “Broadcast News”: “You’re lucky if you can get out while you could still cry.“
“The IFC Media Project” gives Mr. Yago a chance to critique what he sees as misleading media practices. Much of the territory it covers is well worn in print and on the Internet, although not addressed as often on television.
...in the online world, we send our customers to Facebook or MySpace to interact around OUR service; we send them away from our website; we fragment them according to what social network they happen to belong to. That's nuts! The fact that companies DO send their customers off to Facebook is evidence of how important the social networking function is – and of the fact that there is no good alternative.
"My summary of the way some of the established media has responded to the internet is this: it's not newspapers that might become obsolete. It's some of the editors, reporters, and proprietors who are forgetting a newspaper's most precious asset: the bond with its readers," said Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive officer of News Corp. He made his remarks as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Australian Broadcast Corporation.
The business editor of a national newspaper admitted: "I love the leaks. Some of the leaks are obviously done to protect insider shares or to manipulate the share price. There is no question in my mind about that..."
"You'll see a lot more traffic on conservative blogs now that they're playing offense," said Owens, who also writes for PBS' Media Shift and on his own Bloggasm.com. "This may be the turning point for conservative blogs but they're lacking the investigative side or that community-organizing side. They're much more insular in their self-linking. The liberals are better at using other things online to help promote their causes. It's just a matter of older people coming online, with Facebook opening up beyond college students, etc."
Self-flagellation was in evidence all evening to the credit of the journalists present.
...I urged editors not to patronise their readers. People are hungry for a conceptual understanding of economics. Economists I argued were like those tourists on Phuket Beach. Only they were using complex mathematical modelling to measure perturbations on the surface of the water, instead of trying to understand the movement of tectonic plates beneath the waves…
Describing himself as the 'minister for advertising', Burnham said the industry is facing up to challenging times as old media collides with new media, a release issued by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) said.
Online advertising doesn't have the 'familiar anchors' that regulation has in the traditional media world, said Burnham.
"Government is moving away from thinking online is ungovernable," he said.
"We are in a period when we need to establish societal norms. I don't think we are there yet; we'll get there in a self-regulatory way. The stakes in the ground are not quite there, that is something we need to address together."
If the industry acts responsibly, it will 'get full support of the government', advised Burnham, who said he could see the benefit of behavioural targetting online, but that this would require 'informed consent' and raises issues of privacy and civil liberty.
Andy Burnham, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, has called on marketers to ensure the internet is safe for children. He says the net is "ungovernable" and web designers and advertisers have a responsibility to the public when creating online campaigns.
Speaking at the Internet Advertising Bureau Engage conference, Burnham says the creative industry must act to allay parent's fears about the content their children view online.
He adds: "Internet advertisers must face up to the challenging and changing world that the internet is rapidly becoming. Children find the internet very comforting and natural. It has fundamentally changed the way we access information. Online advertisers and content publishers must act responsibly to ensure the pages children view are safe and are in the public interest."
Rt. Hon Andy Burnham Mp, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
Andy Burnham’s afternoon keynote address to the Engage conference emphasised the significance of internet advertising to creative Britain and the wider UK economy, and called for renewed partnership and cooperation in balancing varying demands to ensure the UK remains a world leader.
Having explained that he was not here to talk about X-Factor, Burnham, opened with the famous Saatchi quote on advertising which he saw as being “where art and commerce meet most closely”. Burnham acknowledged that he was in many ways, “the minister for advertising” and pledged to do more for this great “British industry”.
Moving on to talk specifically about the internet, Burnham outlined the “fundamental changes in the way we access information and entertainment” – some of which have of course brought serious issues for Government.
“Safeguarding children continues to be a concern”, said Burnham, pointing out that we safeguard children playing outside and we have a watershed on TV, and saying that the “stakes in the ground” on regulating online content aren’t quite there yet. “That’s something I think we need to work on,” he said.
Focussing now on regulation, Burnham commented: “The Government is moving away from thinking that the online world is completely ungovernable.” The reason for this he said was that the internet was now so much a part of people’s lives: “The online world has moved from the fringes of people’s lives to the very heart”.
Burnham next acknowledged the role of advertising in the online sphere. “The internet wouldn’t exist in the way it does without advertising. Advertising has a crucial role to play”, he said. Online has been an enormously successful business model, he argued, witnessing “phenomenal pace of change”.
This is something Burnham is keen to build on he says, outlining proposals for building what he called a network of “strong systematic support” around the creative industries which would result in the creation of apprenticeship schemes and the like. He further acknowledged that there is “a bedrock of support I need to put in place.”
The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has named Baroness Peta Buscombe as chairman.
Buscombe, who was made a life peer in 1998, will succeed current chairman Sir Christopher Meyer, who leaves the post in March 2009.
Other parties attracting her ire [Baroness Peta Buscombe] include consumer groups such as Which? and Sustain, and charities and non-governmental organisations such as the British Heart Foundation and British Medical Association.
"They build trust in themselves by destroying trust in others. I constantly tell politicians that when they are talking to Which? or Sustain, they're not necessarily talking to the consumer," she points out. "They are so good at lobbying and you get such an influx of information from these groups, most of which is rubbish."
Bumped into Baroness Peta Buscombe at the bar in the Imperial Hotel last night - Peta is the CEO of the Advertising Association. She told me that last week she had attended the Labour party conference, for business purposes only I hasten to add.
I asked her how it had compared to our own conference. "No where near the number of delegates" she said."No real activists as such, a very corporate affair, focused, driven and very smart - so glad I wore my Armani" Priceless!
Several hacks focused on visualising data supplied by Simon Rogers - for example a map of where people in the UK were claiming jobseekers allowance. As the map scrolled across the screen the hacker in question announced "So you can see that rural areas are fine, but surprise, surprise, Birmingham is f*&$%d".
Visualising data is fine, but one of the prototypes was concerned with getting people to understand the real value of the big numbers announced by Governments and businesses. "Won't someone please think of the numbers" added a panel to The Guardian website which allowed you to change any monetary sums in the stories into useful comparisons like what % of the salary of Jonathan Ross this represented, or how many tons the sum would weigh in pennies, or how many Wispa bars you could buy with the money.
Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine have announced plans to introduce a bipartisan bill addressing the controversial topic of net neutrality. The Internet Freedom Preservation Act, expected to be introduced in January 2009, will make it illegal for ISPs to block or slow down specific types of Internet traffic.
In a June 2007 report, America's Federal Trade Commission urged restraint with respect to the new regulations proposed by network neutrality advocates, noting the "broadband industry is a relatively young and evolving one," and given no "significant market failure or demonstrated consumer harm from conduct by broadband providers," such regulations "may well have adverse effects on consumer welfare, despite the good intentions of their proponents." In turn, the FTC conclusions have been questioned in Congress, as in September 2007, when Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., chairman of the Senate interstate commerce, trade and tourism subcommittee, told FTC Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras that he feared new services as groundbreaking as Google could not get started in a system with price discrimination.
