Marion Stokes, a former Communist activist who turned into a recluse, recorded MSNBC, CNN, FOX News and many other news programs, more than 70,000 of them, on Betamax and VHS tapes. “Stokes began recording around the birth of the 24-hour news cycle. She felt it was an important influence on public opinion and wanted to capture this lens through which people view current events,” according to her son. – WBUR
Category: media
Disney Spent A Lot Of Money And A Quarter-Century Getting The Internet Wrong
Kara Swisher has been writing about companies and the internet for even longer than Disney has been trying to figure out how to deal with the contemporary world. Swisher: “Forget the dashing Mandalorian. Do you remember Starwave? Infoseek? Go? Daily Blast? Spoonful.com? Club Penguin? Tapulous? Maker Studios? I’d like to say I don’t either, but I know them very well. They were among the many failed efforts by Disney that I have covered as a reporter since the mid-1990s, when it became clear to Disney that this internet thing just might be a big deal.” – The New York Times
Will The New Streaming Landscape Help Or Hurt The Movies?
“Abundance can be its own kind of scarcity. Without a sense of occasion, without the idea that a given experience is special, even rare, all experiences become equivalent, and our attention follows the path of least resistance.” – The New York Times
City Of Seattle Is Reorganizing Support For A “Creative Cluster.” Movie And Music Unions Aren’t Happy
Seattle is losing music and movie production. The City is “reorganizing” its film and music office into a a larger office that broadens the definition of creative industries to software and gaming. Workers in the film and music industries say they fear support for their work will diminish. – Crosscut
Fans And The False Intimacy Of Podcasts
All across the podcast realm, from the heights of self-help to the depths of true crime, imagined relationships are blossoming. Listeners may press play for the content, but many of them eventually come to nurture something like a one-way friendship with the hosts. – New York Times Magazine
Disney+ Is Attaching Warnings To Its Classic Movies About “Outdated Cultural Depictions”
Users of the service have seen the warnings attached to some of the company’s best-known animated films, such as Dumbo, Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp, with text that reads: “This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions.” – The Guardian
The Latest Jobs Program For Actors? Anti-Sexual Harassment Training Videos
“New or expanded laws mandating sexual harassment training in states like New York and California, as well as a nationwide awakening to a very real problem, have fostered a market for workplace training videos and for actors who can bring #MeToo to life, usually in roles lasting just a minute or two.” – The New York Times
Mo’Nique Sues Netflix For Gender And Racial Discrimination Over Lowball Pay Offer
The Oscar-winning actress and comedienne alleges in her court filing that, in offering her $500,000 as a talent fee for a stand-up comedy special, the company “offered or paid [Chris] Rock, [Dave] Chappelle, [Ellen] DeGeneres, and [Ricky] Gervais forty (40) times more per show … and it offered [Amy] Schumer twenty-six (26) times more per show than Mo’Nique. In short, Netflix’s offer to Mo’Nique perpetuates the drastic wage gap forced upon Black women in America’s workforce.” – NBC
Can Movies Help Preserve Indigenous Languages?
For decades, elders, activists, and linguists have sought to save North America’s indigenous languages, of which about a hundred and sixty-five remain. (There were around three hundred spoken on the continent when Europeans first arrived.) In recent years, film has proved especially fertile ground for this work. – The New Yorker
Why Wile E. Coyote Is A Great Mythic Protagonist
“The Road Runner … can run through paintings, or invisible brick walls, or across vast stretches of open sky. His pursuer cannot. Wile E. Coyote’s schemes and traps sometimes fall apart due to his own hubris, but like any Greek tragic hero, he’s doomed from the start. The universe has it out for him.” – Vulture