Media
Friday, January 18, 2013
Media Film Politics Can the torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty be defended?
Posted by Michael Miner on 01.18.13 at 10:33 AM
A great movie whose expedient plotting is all on Bigelow. Mark Boal, who wrote the script, was nominated for best original screenplay.
In a statement defending herself and her movie, Bigelow calls herself a "lifelong pacifist" opposed to "inhumane treatment of any kind," and she wonders "if some of the sentiments alternately expressed about the film might be more appropriately directed at those who instituted and ordered these U.S. policies [of torture], as opposed to a motion picture that brings the story to the screen. Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement."
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Media News On the Tribune covering the Tribune
Posted by Michael Miner on 01.17.13 at 10:26 AM
- from Broken Deal
- Randy Michaels
HBO for the vulgarity—"You know, shit happens, OK," said Zell to a Wall Street audience he was sucking into his caper. "So anything is possible." But in the pages of the Tribune business section, ONeal and Mills couldn't say shit—and lasciviousness.
"Broken Deal" didn't get into personalities much, though personalities left scars that won't soon fade from the souls of the Tribune Company rank and file who lived through the era. A book will make room, and HBO will revel in them. For instance, it can introduce Zell at the 1999 birthday party he threw for himself in the Aragon Ballroom. Cops closed the Lawrence el station to accommodate Zell's private trains, and Redmoon Theater provided strolling musicians and masked actors dressed as birds on stilts. The writer Joy Bergman, who hooked on with Redmoon to get inside, later described the scene to me:
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Whoa Media Film Music Life Is but a Dream: Beyonce as Deleuze
Posted by Drew Hunt on 01.16.13 at 02:32 PM
As detailed in a recent interview with GQ, Beyonce appears hell-bent on documenting every single moment of her waking life. Stored in what writer Amy Wallace calls the "official Beyoncé archive," a "temperature-controlled digital-storage facility," is "virtually every existing photograph of her . . . every interview she's ever done; every video of every show she's ever performed; every diary entry she's ever recorded while looking into the unblinking eye of her laptop." The majority of the film is purportedly culled from this archive, which is also said to include "thousands of hours of private footage, compiled by a 'visual director' Beyonce employs who has shot practically her every waking moment, up to sixteen hours a day, since 2005."
Media News A home for StoryCorps at the Cultural Center
Posted by Deanna Isaacs on 01.16.13 at 01:58 PM
Starting this spring (date TBA), the public will be able to reserve times for recording sessions in which one person of a pair interviews the other.
You can come with your mother, your child, your mentor, your neighbor, your lover, your coworker, your long-lost classmate, or even your nemesis—any meaningful pairing. StoryCorps has been doing this since 2003; you can sample the results here.
Media News The undeserving walk among us and the press has a bead on them
Posted by Michael Miner on 01.16.13 at 06:50 AM
"Lance Armstrong no more deserves a shimmering spot in the limelight," it pronounced, "than Sammy Sosa deserves a spot in the baseball Hall of Fame."
Pundits like to pronounce on what people in the news do and don't deserve, but do they understand how magisterial and self-important they sound when they do? Not to mention fatuous. I have no idea how to measure deservability but there's a strong odor of irrelevance to it. The young man didn't deserve to get sick and die. Yet he did. This newspaper disapproves.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Technology Media News Aaron Swartz: Death by government?
Posted by Deanna Isaacs on 01.15.13 at 04:26 PM
- Flickr/Creative Commons
Swartz hanged himself last Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. He was 26 years old and facing a possible 35-year prison sentence for downloading millions of academic articles from JSTOR, using MIT access. JSTOR was not pressing charges (and subsequently decided to make its materials freely available), but MIT and the U.S. attorney proceeded with the case, reportedly in an attempt to demonstrate the dire consequences of Internet crime. Trial was set for later this year.
The government dropped its charges yesterday.
Described as a brilliant intellect and selfless striver for a better world, Swartz believed in open access to research materials. An activist who also battled restrictions on Internet freedom, he founded Demand Progress, which, in 2011, blocked the Stop Online Piracy Act.
A packed audience in the tiny Central Avenue Synagogue heard his father, Robert Swartz, wonder aloud why, while other technology pioneers cut corners to make their advances and are honored, Aaron was being prosecuted for something that wasn't even "legally illegal."
There's an online memorial here.
Media News Meet the model 21st-century journalist
Posted by Michael Miner on 01.15.13 at 10:04 AM
It's a preposterous job description. But the other day I realized I actually know someone like that: my old writing partner.
I certainly don't fit the bill. If I were playing Wheel of Fortune I wouldn't recognize the future if the only letters missing were the e's. I remember the time in the late 70s when the editorial staffs of the Sun-Times, where I worked, and its then sister Daily News were called into a rare joint meeting, and the editorial director for the two papers announced in tones of highest urgency that the company would be spending a couple million dollars to computerize the newsrooms.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Media News Trib story needs to clear the air
Posted by Michael Miner on 01.14.13 at 10:41 AM
"A large swath of China has been gripped for days by what is being called an 'airpocalypse,' a prolonged spell of the worst air pollution on record in Beijing."
Called by whom?
Is this what the locals have dubbed it? In that case there's a bigger story here—the rise of English as the universal language of grass-roots sarcasm.
No one's quoted in the story but Zhao Zhangyuan of the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences. If the quip's his, don't you think he deserves credit for his ability to get off a good one in a second language?
Friday, January 11, 2013
Crime Media News Homicide Watch expanding to Chicago in partnership with Sun-Times
Posted by Michael Miner on 01.11.13 at 12:33 PM
I wrote about Homicide Watch last September, when it was a highly praised but furiously paddling two-person operation trying to raise $40,000 on Kickstarter so it could stay in business. Homicide Watch offers "a new kind of crime journalism that is database driven," explained Laura Amico, who founded and runs Homicide Watch with her husband, Chris Amico. "It allows coverage to be both granular and cumulative." Even then, the Amicos wanted to expand beyond the Washington, D.C., city limits; they were fielding inquiries from other cities—though Chicago wasn't one of them.
Media News Community Media Workshop announces its newest Studs Terkel Award winners
Posted by Michael Miner on 01.11.13 at 06:45 AM
• Megan Cottrell, a reporter/blogger for the Chicago Reporter
• Fernando Diaz, manager editor of Hoy Chicago
• Dave Hoekstra, a reporter for the Sun-Times
The Terkel awards, launched in 1994, "honor outstanding media professionals for excellence in covering and reflecting Chicago’s diverse communities." And as that sounds stuffy, the CMW website also puts it this way:
We honor journalists who go the extra mile to report news "from the people who made Chicago, news that's bottom up rather than up, down," as Studs said at our 2007 awards event. "That's what this is all about."
The Terkels will be given out on March 14.
