MetaFilter posts tagged with newmedia and media

Notes From The Only Man To Die Of Trench Foot In The Media War

hoodrich — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 16:26:14 -0800

Notes From The Only Man To Die Of Trench Foot In The Media War by Douglas Haddow "If you want to be a freelance writer and maintain a marginally civilized lifestyle, it’s best to keep cozy with anyone who can facilitate the transfer of funds into your wallet. Part-time prostitution is a good gig if you can pick your clients and fetch a decent rate, otherwise, it pays dividends to maintain copywriting credentials and occasionally dip your pen in the company ink."

J-School Confidential

reenum — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 11:54:26 -0800

An oldie, but a goodie: Michael Lewis goes to Columbia's School of Journalism to see what such schools actually do to prepare their students.

User-driven discontent

Rhaomi — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:38:07 -0800

Yesterday morning, social news juggernaut Digg.com finally unveiled its much-ballyhooed redesign: Digg 4.0. More than a simple cosmetic makeover, the new edition of the popular link-sharing platform fundamentally alters the underlying mechanics of the site. Not only has emphasis shifted from users to content publishers -- major news sources like CNN and Gawker now have RSS-powered accounts that users must "follow" and which automatically submit new stories -- but the submission process itself has become decentralized and opaque. Whereas all content used to enter public "upcoming" queues, allowing users to browse new content and vote up or down what was in line to be published to the front page, submissions now enter a figurative black box. Users can only view not-yet-popular content if it's been submitted or upvoted by friends or published by selected media sources, and this mixture of personalized content has now replaced the site's vaunted front page. Unsurprisingly, this has led to an outcry among Digg's userbase, who lament the reduction in user participation, the perceived selling out of niche content providers in favor of mainstream media, and the ransacking of the site's archives (example), in addition to a rash of bugs and slowdowns, a sharp curtailment in the site's feature set, and an assortment of other problems. But while previous transgressions by the site's staff such as the controversial 2007 censorship of the HD-DVD encryption key (previously) resulted in prompt backtracking and humble apologies, it's looking like CEO Kevin Rose and company are standing by the redesign. Will this bold move lead to a revitalization of Digg's slowly declining traffic and a sea change in how news is shared on the web? Or does the ongoing exodus of longtime users to Reddit and other rivals signal the demise of a site trying too hard to ape Twitter and Facebook?

a real reality show

Potomac Avenue — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:59:01 -0800

The Web Is Not A TV Channel is the latest in a series of admonitions for musical and marketing industry types from music blogger, record company founder and bass player Dave Allen. Previously Inspired by David Foster Wallace's "E Unibus Plurum; Television and U.S. Fiction" pdf warning

Choose your own misadventure: the story of Interfilm

escabeche — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:45:32 -0800

" There were lots of small children in the audience. I thought about asking one little girl if she had voted for the paddle, the rod or the cattle prod." In 1995, a company called Interfilm revolutionized the movie industry. Oh, no, wait, it didn't. Audiences at Mr. Payback, "the first interactive movie," pressed buttons on a joystick attached to their seat to vote on the actions of the characters on-screen -- for instance, what kind of physical abuse a captured thug should undergo. Despite the pedigree of director Bob Gale (writer/producer of Back to the Future) and co-star Christopher Lloyd, critics were not impressed. The company folded a week after releasing its third interfilm, "I'm Your Man," scored by Joe Jackson, which did, a few years Interfilm was the brainchild of "conceptualist" and guy-with-gigantic-glasses Bob Bejan (Dateline NBC interview), who now works at a next-generation, data-driven marketing agency that delivers strategic, multi-channeled communication solutions designed to cultivate and sustain relationships between brands and their audiences. Watch: Clips from "Mr. Payback." The making of "I'm Your Man." (warning: A. Whitney Brown.) Read: the New York Times on the 1998 DVD release of "I'm Your Man." Booklet copy from the "I'm Your Man" DVD.

Open-source online exhibit platform

Miko — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:40:31 -0800

Omeka is a newly available, open-source web platform, bringing good-looking, functional online exhibitry within reach of smaller museums, libraries, and arts groups. From the Center for History and New Media.

Moguls of New Media

divabat — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 21:06:06 -0800

WSJ: Moguls of New Media Have nearly a million friends on MySpace and you get $5000 endorsements. Make a comedy podcast with cocktail recipes and you get endorsed by Steve Jobs and get interest from advertisers. Post seemingly impossible self-potraits on Flickr and you get hired by Toyota. The Wall Street Journal looks at these and many more "whos' who of new media". from BlogHer

Craigslist dooms Bay Area print media

jonson — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 09:51:47 -0800

Interesting (if biased) article on the downside of Craigslist's populist appeal in the form of it's contribution to the imminent death of the print newsmedia, especially in the SF Bay Area.

Parsing Terror

digaman — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 07:36:09 -0800

Osama bin Laden, littérateur and new-media star. A thought-provoking analysis of bin Laden's adept use of Koranic language and the Internet by Bruce B. Lawrence, an Islamic scholar at Duke who edited a new anthology of bin Laden's public statements called Messages to the World. The Western media -- says the millionaire mass-murderer formerly trained as a useful ally by the CIA via Pakistan's ISI -- "implants fear and helplessness in the psyche of the people of Europe and the United States. It means that what the enemies of the United States cannot do, its media are doing!" Know thy enemy. [via Arts and Letters Daily.]

Public Broadcasting Gets Funky

sylloge — Fri, 11 Aug 2000 13:05:24 -0800

Public Broadcasting Gets Funky
The CBC (sort of like NPR, but Canadian, federally-funded and with TV too) has a stealth project, 120seconds. They are planning to embrace new media in a big way and this is their start: stories, music, film, experiments. Not bad.