Category: media

Why is their so little innovation in America’s public radio? Ira Glass thinks he knows: “This is exactly the problem in public broadcasting in general and public radio right now. You’ve got people, you’ve got innovative ideas, you’ve got programming executives who know what should be done next — and, literally, there’s no machinery to fund innovation. And so that’s why you get one new show every four or five years.”

“California finds itself competing with almost every state in the union. Thanks to an array of tax incentives offered from Rhode Island to New Mexico, screenwriters are recasting their plots to accommodate new locales, producers are learning new math to stretch budgets and Hollywood has settled into a multiple-time-zone way of life. Hollywood remains the place where most movies are conceived and financed. And the economic and emotional effect of so-called runaway production has been blunted by a fresh wave of television shows made in town — TV production has surged 64% since 2000, as local movie filming fell 8%. But there’s no masking the fact that moviemaking has turned into part of the national economy.”

Complaints to the FCC about obscenity on TV and radio in the US were down dramatically in the last quarter of 2004. “FCC officials attributed the marked drop — which saw complaints plummet from 317,833 to 157,650 from one quarter to the next — to the end of e-mail and write-in campaigns aimed at certain television and radio stations. The report did not identify which organizations were behind the campaigns or which broadcasters were targeted.”

Your movie theatre experience is about to get better. “At a time when movie attendance is flagging, when home entertainment is offering increasing competition and when the largest theater chains – Regal Entertainment, AMC Entertainment (which has recently announced a merger with Loews Cineplex) and Cinemark – are focused on shifting from film to digital projection, a handful of smaller companies with names like Muvico Theaters, Rave Motion Pictures and National Amusements are busy rethinking what it means to go to the movie theater.”

“British churches are divided over whether to allow filming of “The Da Vinci Code,” an adaptation of Dan Brown’s biblically revisionist best seller. The novel’s claim that Jesus Christ fathered a child with Mary Magdalene has drawn strong protests from the Roman Catholic Church, and the movie version has fanned whispers of discontent in the cathedral city of Lincoln, where Tom Hanks and the crew were filming Tuesday.”

“While many of the movies on different airlines are identical in name, the process of choosing in-flight entertainment is far more complicated than you think. With a cabin full of already edgy frequent fliers, even seemingly benign movies are carefully edited to appeal to the widest crowd possible.”

“Nowadays, nudity is a decided liability when it comes to the commercial success of the movie. In 2004, none of the six major studios’ top 25 grossing films, led by Spider-Man 2, Shrek 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and The Incredibles, contained any sexually oriented nudity; only one had a restrictive R rating—Warner Bros.’ Troy—and that was mainly due to the film’s gory violence, not its sexual content. The absence of sex—at least graphic sex—is key to the success of Hollywood’s moneymaking movies.”

“Podcasting is turning conventional wisdom about TV broadcasting on its head as thousands of people sign up to download and listen to free, audio-only versions of their favorite shows or special MP3-only programming.”

A Kentucky public radio station has returned Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac to its schedule after pulling it from the air two weeks ago. WUKY General Manger Tom Godell dropped “The Writer’s Almanac” after questioning the language in some of the poems Keillor had been reading on the show over the last year. “It’s not like he’s behaving like Howard Stern, but the FCC has been so inconsistent, we don’t know where we stand,” Godell told the Lexington Herald-Leader about the initial decision to drop the show. “We could no longer risk a fine.”

A new study “suggests internet use among Canadians is up about 46 per cent to 12.7 hours a week from 8.7 hours in 2002. That increase comes while radio listening has dropped an average of five hours to 11 hours per week. Television still remained at the top of the list of most-used media sources, according to the poll, with Canadians watching an average of 14.3 hours of TV per week. But younger internet users spent 14.7 hours online a week, about three hours more than they did on radio and television. Teens spent only 2.5 hours a week reading newspapers.”