Category: media

“Adjusted for a rise in the average ticket price, attendance is down almost 5 percent this year. But America’s love affair with the movies is now written in the language of box office, numbers that once interested only studio accountants as a measure of whether a film would pay for itself. The figures have become some moviegoers’ proxy for cultural worth.”

Not unlike homebuyers facing tougher standards to get a mortgage, the people who greenlight movies are facing more stringent demands from their financiers. “All of the studios, if they want to get a deal done in this environment, will need to better align their interests with investors,”

At one point in the 1990s, NBC had 16 half-hour sitcoms on the air. This fall, it has four. And two of those four–The Office and 30 Rock–though critically beloved (both are up for Best Comedy Emmys on Sunday, Sept. 21), are struggling to be embraced by mainstream audiences.

“The logic is this: People like TV. They don’t want to give it up even if the economy is going to hell in a handbasket. Actually, they may be less willing to sacrifice it in a recession, according to some Wall Street analysts.”

“The CBC is expected to announce this morning that Denise Donlon, former president of Sony Music Canada, will become executive director of CBC Radio. Donlon is widely considered among the most influential woman in Canadian music, and her appointment may signal the direction in which CBC executive vice-president Richard Stursberg wants CBC radio programming to go.”

“Increasingly, movie makers (especially European ones) are depicting immigration not as a one-way journey but rather as a more or less permanent state of flux between worlds that may seem very different but are, in fact, steadily becoming more inter-connected.”

A new report from market researcher NPD Group shows that $8 out of every $10 spent on movies goes to buying and renting DVDs.

“For dramatic writers in many media, cellphones’ ubiquity — and the particular way they condense time and space — creates both opportunities and obstacles.”

an interesting eclectic celebration of music across Canada. “No public radio service I know of is so conspicuously designed to showcase the epic range of moods, tastes and peccadilloes conveyed in the contemporary musical output of its own creative community. That’s a big deal, something to celebrate.”

“Ye Hum Naheen” (“This is Not Us”), a protest song recorded by eight Pakistani pop stars, has given rise to a petition, signed by more than 60 million people, denouncing terrorism as un-Islamic.