The digital commons fosters great communal benefits that go beyond being a publisher in the traditional sense. The fact that YouTube is open and free allows all kinds of creativity to flourish in ways that are not enabled by the entertainment industry. The tragedy is that it also empowers pornographers and propagandists for terror.
Author: Douglas McLennan
TV’s Existential Crisis
TV, the art form, is in its platinum age. But the future present of video packaging and distribution is on-demand and digital. TV the platform simply cannot survive under its current business model. It must evolve.
Justin Davidson: I’m Not Sure The Met Can Survive Levine’s Disgrace
“The company is an outgrowth from, and a uniquely regressive example of, the 19th-century commercial opera houses that flourished through specialization, activity, and growth. August companies erected massive buildings, mounted expensive shows, packed in audiences, and concentrated prestige in the hands of very few gatekeepers, all of them men. That power structure produced a century and a half of lavishly misogynistic operas in which women are constantly going mad, turning into prostitutes, dying, or all three.”
LA Weekly’s New Owners Gut The Publication’s Staff
Nine of the 13 members of the editorial staff lost their jobs, including all the top editors and all but one of the staff writers.
Author Sues Ex-Girlfriend, Saying She Used Spyware To Plagiarize His Writing
Chaz Reetz-Laiolo alleges that Emma Cline sold him her computer with spyware installed, which she used to gain access to his email and other private accounts, stealing from drafts of screenplays he was writing for scenes and language in The Girls. His suit says Cline used the access to “systematically surveil his private email obsessively over a period of years”. Cline’s countersuit acknowledges that she used the spyware to look into Reetz-Laiolo’s alleged infidelity during their relationship, but says she had no access to the software once she sold the computer.
UK Regional Theatre Box Office Up 18 Percent In Three Years
“Data from industry body UK Theatre has revealed that total box office income for member venues in 2016 was £470 million, up from £397 million in 2013. This was due to a 10% rise in average ticket price paid over the period, equivalent to a £2.15 increase per ticket, as well as improved ticket sales, fuller theatres and more productions.”
Restoring The Longest Painting In America
“The quarter-mile-long (0.4-kilometer-long) panorama toured the U.S. after it was completed in 1848. A section was featured at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. But the panorama deteriorated after so much traveling on wagons and trains, rolling and unrolling. Paint dried up and flaked off, and the panorama was put into storage.”
This Is What Happens When You Put A Price On Everything
“Arguments from economic rationality can obscure as much as they reveal. For if capitalism meant the transformation of land and lives into units of wealth-producing human capital, it also meant the transformation of sickness and death into a currency of wealth-reducing decapitalization. And this poses a question: wealth for whom?”
The News Business Is Collapsing In Front Of Us
“Virtually every news organization in America has seen its audience decline (and in some cases crater) since the record numbers of last winter. Some blame the Google and Facebook algorithms (could real news getting caught up in the fight against the fake stuff?). Others speculate that readers and viewers are simply tiring of the 24/7 onslaught of crazy. Either way, declining audience equals declining advertising revenue, and we know what that means.”
Research: What Makes A Poem Stick Out?
Researchers speculate that evoking strong imagery may make the content of a poem easier to mentally process, and thus make the experience of reading it more enjoyable. Alternately, “readers might pay closer attention to poems that are vivid,” the researchers write.