Media Mindfulness

This interesting item on “prosumers” posting video for their sites not just to mess around but for building their business:
Advertising Age - The Growing Potential of Prosumer-Produced Video Content:
Not consumer-content generators
Peeler, Otalvaro and DePew are just three examples from a growing army of video producers who should not really be lumped in with the consumer [...]

It has been said that if you think you are watching a show about a bunch of plane crash survivors, you are watching the wrong show. The show in question, of course, is Lost. The surprise breakout on ABC is most definitely not your average program, and the one thing that keeps me interested is [...]

I guess the Marine training that equates a hard-on with a deadly weapon translates well to the optical unconsciousness. At FreeVideoBlog soldiers are posting their combat footage (and in other cases doing things as mundane as doing BMX bike tricks in the middle of a vacant desert). Some of the clips are straightforward sad, with [...]

You can thank the media literacy movement for this:
Advertising Age - FTC, HHS Call for Strict Standards in Children’s Food Marketing:

Two government agencies are calling on advertisers to market only healthier food products to children in the continuing clampdown on children’s obesity.

Sphere: Related Content

A great article From The Economist print edition on the possibilities of “citizen journalism” as traditional newspapers decline:
Journalism too is becoming interactive, and maybe better
Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, says that “journalism needs to become a community service rather than a profit centre,” and is working on making this happen. As The State of the News [...]

Some stories lend themselves to great headlines (”Cocaine cola a real buzz” for instance), but the demise of the Village Voice tends to not offer much humor (except in the Twainian sense of “news of my death is greatly exagerated”). I have mixed feelings. For those of you outside the Manhattan echo chamber, the Voice’s storied tradition of radical politics and culture was absorbed by a national chain of weekly urban “independents,” New Times Media based in Phoenix. The company also owns the LA Weekly, Seattle Weekly and SF Weekly among others. Many are alarmed by the firing of long-time investigative reporter, James Ridgeway. Add to the mix resignations, articles with bogus anecdotes, a shift in priorities and the international trend of media consolidation, and you get one pissed off crowd of readers. Plus New Yorkers are a tough audience to please. Go to a Yankees game and you will know what I mean.

It’s that time of year for the international holiday for freaks, TV Turnoff Week. Sponsored by Adbusters, this has become a calling card for school librarians (yes, they are feeing the pinch) and is a good time to reflect on our addiction to media. A few questions, though. What is a TV anymore? With TiVo, [...]

Today there will be national demonstrations against revised efforts to “reform” immigration law that are expected to draw over a million folks. This is great news. In an effort to explain why this sleeping jaguar has awakened, some in the mainstream media have finally examined the debate from a Latino perspective. In particular CNN profiled [...]

One of the least discussed aspects of media is the extent to which the auto industry actually shores up programming and content. In our ad-based media system, car commercials represent the single largest group of ads. My non-scientific estimate is that car ads account for roughly 25% of primetime airtime on television. With a slumping [...]

NBC reports the latest blame game: the war in Iraq is the media’s fault. Kinda funny since the mainstream media, thanks to the Pentagon, is generally only allowed the US military’s POV (point of view). I suppose you could blame the government’s PR handlers for losing the war. After all, bombs don’t kill people, cameras [...]

Implicit in the following LA Times story is a lament from the industry (yet more evidence that all media do is report on themselves) that the era of an informed citizenry is a thing of the past because there will be no infrastructure for information gathering. Corporate media love to think of themselves as the [...]

Poor Steven Johnson got smacked around by the so-called progressive left for claiming that media make us smarter. I haven’t read his latest tome, Everything Bad is Good for You, but I plan to because I thought his book Emergence was amazing (it examines “emergence” theory as it relates to cities, ants, brains and computers). [...]