Media
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Posted
by Michael Miner on
Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 9:01 AM
- Conscientious editor dreams of the day's raw copy
Trib
a stareAnd met the man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish, I wish, he’d go away.
His absence haunts the Tribune, and a lot of other papers too. He (or, very definitely, she) is remembered as an editor. Not the lofty editor who designs and leads the great campaigns that win the coveted prizes. And not the obsessive who can lecture an hour about the comma. I'm speaking of the minions who once formed the protective layer of surly common sense that insulated a newspaper's daily report from the reporters' illogic, muddled language, and failure to think through what they were trying to write about.
Continue reading »
Tags: Copy editors, Antigonish, Chicago Tribune, Gene Wolfe, James Bogard, Oak Park, Barney O'Reilly, Wednesday Journal
Permalink
|
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Posted
by Sam Worley on
Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 1:14 PM
Oh, hey—did you catch the Super Bowl? Yeah, me neither. I still don’t even know who was playing. I was at the grocery store buying chicken thighs and canned diced tomatoes. But I did watch the halftime show! And I watched that
two-minute Clint Eastwood spot—the one people are saying is
basically a campaign advertisement for Barack Obama? “Halftime in America”? Nominally it was a Chrysler commercial. God, what a bunch of maudlin schlock, right? What was the deal with Clint Eastwood’s voice? If this is what the campaign’s going to be like, I’ll take those pie-in-the-sky proposals for lunar colonies any day. You know what else the campaign could use? Some YouTube videos of cute kids. A humble suggestion, after the jump.
Continue reading »
Tags: Super Bowl, Halftime in America, Chrysler, Clint Eastwood, Barack Obama, Video
Permalink
|
Posted
by Sam Worley on
Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 12:30 PM
A suite of essays on Facebook in the
New York Times Sunday Review this week includes
a contribution by local legal scholar Lori Andrews, who was featured in December
in the Reader's People Issue. (
My boss, Mara Shalhoup, is treating Andrews’s piece elsewhere.) I was particularly befuddled by Evgeny Morozov’s
“The Death of the Cyberflaneur,” which takes the discussion in a direction . . . you wouldn’t expect. Morozov laments the passing of what he calls the “cyberflaneur” (actually the term was coined on a website called, for some reason, Ceramics Today), based on the original, more corporeal flaneur—the boots-on-the-ground flaneur. A 19th-century French ideal whom Baudelaire and Benjamin (stay with me here) viewed as “an emblem of modernity,” the flaneur in Paris “would leisurely stroll through its streets and especially its arcades . . . to cultivate what Honore de Balzac called ‘the gastronomy of the eye.’ . . . His goal was to observe, to bathe in the crowd, taking in its noises, its chaos, its heterogeneity, its cosmopolitanism.”
OK, now think about GeoCities circa 1995.
Continue reading »
Tags: Lori Andrews, New York Times, Sunday Review, Evgeny Morozov, The Death of the Cyberflaneur, GeoCities, Facebook, People Issue, Baudelaire, Honore de Balzac, Walter Benjamin, flaneur
Permalink
|
Posted
by Sam Worley on
Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 10:33 AM
On account of some neuroses*, I had put off reading Gabriel Sherman’s
New York cover story,
“The Emasculation of Wall Street”—also maybe on account of that headline, from which not much good can follow. (See the cover art, if the hed’s too subtle. Literally, it is a photo of a guy grabbing his crotch and grimacing.) But the article—I caved—is edifying if you read it alongside Chris Lehmann’s
“Dick Joke,” in which the author dismantles what seems to be Sherman’s point: Wall Street bankers feel threatened (“castrated,” even) by the spectral presence of greater regulation and by, yup, Occupy Wall Street (“which does appear to have rattled a lot of nerves”). You don’t have to get too far into the
New York piece to be struck by its tone deafness—one thing that Sherman establishes early on is that, on Wall Street, “there’s a growing sense that the money that was being made during the Bush boom won’t be back.” Can you imagine?
*Namely a subscription to the print edition, which seems so irrelevant by Thursday, when it arrives in the mail, if you’ve read the whole magazine on Monday.
Tags: New York magazine, Gabriel Sherman, the Awl, Chris Lehmann, Occupy Wall Street, Dick Joke, The Emasculation of Wall Street, Wall Street
Permalink
|
Monday, February 6, 2012
Posted
by Michael Miner on
Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 8:57 AM
The Michigan primary was the last day of February. “I don’t want to have to actually campaign there,” the Front-runner told his marketing guy, who carried the title of Traditional Values Articulator.
“I’m coming home. I just want to feel the love.”
“They haven’t had much to love in Michigan for a long time,” said the TVA.
Continue reading »
Tags: Mitt Romney, Michigan, Republican presidential primaries, George Romney, Self-deportation, Creative destruction
Permalink
|
Friday, February 3, 2012
Posted
by Michael Miner on
Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 10:54 AM
The
Pew Research Center has put its finger on a Facebook paradox.
Some 20 to 30 percent of Facebook users are "power users," according to a study by the Pew's Internet & American Life Project, done in collaboration with Facebook. This is the minority that partakes of at least one Facebook activity at a "much higher rate" than the rest of us. (About 5 percent do everything you can do on Facebook at a much higher rate.)
The result, says "Why most Facebook users get more than they give," which was released Friday, is the oddity expressed in the report's title. "The average Facebook user receives friend requests, receives personal messages, is tagged in photos, and receives feedback in terms of 'likes' at a higher frequency than they contribute."
Continue reading »
Tags: Facebook, Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, Facebook friendships
Permalink
|
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Posted
by Michael Miner on
Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 5:34 PM
- An old press pass for "A Black's View of the News"
Don Cornelius, the creator of Soul Train,
died Wednesday in California. Cornelius broke into television at WCIU, Channel 26, in Chicago in the late 60s, on
A Black's Views of the News. My friend Tom Weinberg recalls this was "the first nightly black news program in the country." Weinberg was the producer, his first job.
Weinberg, who's had a long career in independent video, is the creator of the Media Burn Independent Video Archive, an online museum full of astonishing stuff. He's just offered up these relics—to the left is an old press pass, and there's more after the jump.
Continue reading »
Tags: Don Cornelius, Soul Train, A Black's Views of the News, Tom Weinberg, Media Burn, FuzzyMemories.TV, WCIU, Video
Permalink
|
Posted
by Michael Miner on
Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 1:18 PM
The
Reader's Mick Dumke is a 2012 winner of the Studs Terkel Community Media Award, which is given by the Community Media Workshop, based at Columbia College.
Dumke was named Thursday, along with Maria Hinojosa of National Public Radio and Chip Mitchell of WBEZ.
Here's a link to CMW's profile of Mick. It begins:
Continue reading »
Tags: Mick Dumke, Chicago Reader, Community Media Workshop, Maria Hinojosa, Chip Mitchell, National Public Radio, WBEZ, Thom Clark, Ben Joravsky, John Conroy, Kari Lydersen
Permalink
|
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Posted
by Ben Sachs on
Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 3:46 PM
- From Nelson Carvajal's Cobraface
On Thursday night from 6 to 8:30 PM, the gallery and social hub
I Am Logan Square (located at 2644 N. Milwaukee, next to the soon-to-be-reopened Logan Theater) will kick off an exhibit by local video makers Nelson Carvajal and Amir George. Titled “Film Is Dead,” the exhibit is posed as a rallying cry for new forms of storytelling afforded by appropriated images and consumer devices like flip cameras. I recently talked with Carvajal about the exhibit, and I found his enthusiasm palpable. He tends to jump from big ideas to impressions of his immediate surroundings, speaking over his own sentences as if reediting an ongoing video stream in his mind—he should make for good company on Thursday. A partial transcript of our discussion is after the jump.
Continue reading »
Tags: Film Is Dead, I Am Logan Square, Nelson Carvajal, Amir George, video mash-up, Flip cameras, Kodak, new media, YouTube
Permalink
|
Posted
by Michael Miner on
Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 2:26 PM
I came to work Tuesday and opened my computer to the
Reader home page. Facing me on the screen was Anne Ford's as-told-to interview with Richard Kieckhefer, "historian of magic." (He's a professor of religion at Northwestern.)
"Nearly everybody in the Middle Ages believed in magic," Kieckhefer's account begins.
Next I opened my e-mail. There was a note from a colleague, and the next e-mail I read turned out to be from an author, Jerry Kubicki, pitching his new book, A Dubious Dream. He began:
"History records many people that have had super natural powers. Are they all myth? Or is there a common thread between these unique people throughout the millennium? What if an item has come to earth and has provided those that possess it powers that are both good and evil?"
Continue reading »
Tags: Richard Kieckhefer, Anne Ford, magic, the supernatural, Jerry Kubicki, A Dubious Dream, Lola James, Bound to Remember
Permalink
|
