News
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:
Seriously? The Internet News Shoenice put my phone number on YouTube
Posted by Luca Cimarusti on 01.17.13 at 07:32 AM
Somewhere along the way, I found myself fascinated with Shoenice. I am by no means proud of my love for Shoenice videos—I'll be the first to admit that watching a video of a middle-aged man sitting by himself and eating an entire birthday cake (including the burning candles) is more than just a little dark. So naturally I'm not proud to admit that when Shoenice posted his phone number to Facebook on Saturday morning, I immediately picked up my phone to call him. I got his voicemail, hung up, and didn't think anything else of it.
That is until I got a handful of blocked phone calls a few minutes later. I answered one, and it was from what sounded like a prepubescent boy telling me to fuck off. It was when I answered another to hear someone impersonating Shoenice's video introduction line ("Hey everyone, Shoenice again," as demonstrated in this video of him eating a dozen raw eggs, shells and all) that I started to realize I had made a huge mistake. Curiosity was about to kill the cat.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
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.
Did You Read __________? News Did you read about marijuana busts, Chief Keef being busted, and dudes intimidated by female rap fans?
Posted by Reader staff on 01.16.13 at 11:40 AM
Hey, did you read:
• Alexis Madrigal on air pollution in Beijing now and Pittsburgh up to the mid-20th century—and some thoughts from Chicago's smoke inspector in 1896? —John Dunlevy
• That busts for marijuana possession dropped significantly after Chicago's new pot law went into effect last summer? —Mick Dumke
• That Chief Keef has been taken into custody for violating his probation by doing that video interview for Pitchfork? —Leor Galil
• That someone was shot outside our building this morning? —Mick Dumke
• The argument that the Second Amendment was ratified in order to assure southern slaveholders that their patrols designed to prevent uprisings could continue? —Tony Adler
• Meaghan Garvey's essay on dudes who are intimidated by female rap fans? —Leor Galil
• The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop, the ultimate in pop-critic year-end lists? (Rob Harvilla's essay on rapper-singer Future is a standout: "He uses Auto-Tune the way Picasso used nude women, the way Obama uses drones.") —Tal Rosenberg
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.
Did You Read __________? News Did you read about two spaces after a period, $33 million to close lawsuits, and 18 human heads at O'Hare?
Posted by Reader staff on 01.15.13 at 11:10 AM
- Lifehacker
- NO!
Hey, did you read:
• That the city of Chicago is getting ready to pay another $33 million to close two police-related lawsuits? —Mick Dumke
• About the 18 human heads that turned up at O'Hare? —Luca Cimarusti
• About the Kichwa, an indigenous tribe in the Ecuadoran rainforest, and its commitment to armed resistance against oil prospecting in their region? (Oddest part of the story: the tribe's shaman is married to a British businesswoman.) —Ben Sachs
• About developments being made towards creating "wearable" computers? —Tal Rosenberg
• How owner CBS overruled CNET's editorial decision to give its CES best-in-show award to a new DVR incorporating ad-skipping technology? —John Dunlevy
• That Slate says you should probably just disable Java in your browser now, seeing as this is the second time in the last six months it's had major security flaws? —Julia Thiel
• Farhad Manjoo's revisiting of his rant about why hitting the space bar twice after a period is ridiculous? —Kevin Warwick
• Patti Smith's advice for artists hoping to get a start in New York? —Tony Adler
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
Broken Technology News Tear down the Apple Store, put up a parking lot
Posted by Tal Rosenberg on 01.14.13 at 04:45 PM
- The scene of the accident
- @jenspace/Instagram
The Apple store there is a giant horizontal rectangle, with glass walls on the shorter sides and titanium walls on the longer ones—it basically looks like a giant G-Force external hard drive—atop the Red Line stop at North and Clybourn. The driver, who's 79 years old, crashed through on the North Avenue side, injuring one person. In a situation with consumer-theory theses to last a lifetime, many customers documented the crash with their iPhones.
For a gallery of Apple-store ruin porn, check out this slide show via Chicagoist.
Tal Rosenberg writes about technology every Monday.
Did You Read __________? News Did you read about gun violence, CTA fare hikes, and a Death Star?
Posted by Reader staff on 01.14.13 at 11:08 AM
Hey, did you read:
• The sobering timeline of Chicago's 2012 homicides by DNAinfo.com? —Mick Dumke
• David Carr on the publication of handgun permit names and addresses? ("In trendy journalistic circles, data is all the rage," but data "doesn’t always tell the truth.") —Steve Bogira
• How Congress essentially blocked research on gun violence? —Mick Dumke
• That today is the day that fare hikes go into effect on CTA bus and rail lines (including a new five-dollar charge on Blue Line trains leaving O'Hare)? —Tal Rosenberg
• The White House response to a petition to "secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016"? —John Dunlevy
• The chart of emotions for which English offers no names? —Tony Adler
That Hollywood is working double time to make up for the gender-equality shortcomings of the Obama administration? (Of course, Hollywood still has plenty to answer for.) —Mara Shalhoup
