Category: media

As National Public Radio continues to make use of the $236 million bequest from philanthropist Joan Kroc, the network is pursuing more such gifts, using the reach of its affiliate stations to attract ultra-high-rolling donors. At the same time, NPR’s priorities regarding the money are becoming clear: news is where the money is, and news is primarily where the new money is going.

When shock jock Howard Stern announced this week that he would be departing his syndicated radio show to join the lineup of Sirius Satellite Radio, it marked a seismic shift in the broadcasting landscape. Satellite is still in its infancy, and while it has been growing steadily, it has yet to attract an audience the size of Stern’s current one. And unlike other well-known hosts who have defected to satellite recently, Stern has the potential to bring a sizable chunk of the middle American radio audience with him to the other side.

How should critics approach the new wave of decidedly skewed “documentary” films in an age of political polarization and intolerance? Many readers complain that such films are nothing but propaganda, and they’re not exactly wrong, but should reviewers be expected to chase down the truth of every supposed fact in every nonfiction film? And can such pictures really be reviewed simply as movies, or must they be separately graded as political documents. It’s a tricky issue…

“Wires, batteries, plastic containers, cardboard boxes, drills, glue guns, a single-watt FM transmitter, perhaps a toy truck or a stuffed rabbit — put these together and you have a personal radio station that could start a public revolution. At least that’s the idea behind Radio Re-Volt: One Person .00One Watt, a project by Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center that intends to open the radio airwaves to the general public, one small radio station at a time.”

New technology that can “syndicate” online audio content to iPods and other digital music devices in the same way that RSS feeds distribute text from web sites is gaining in popularity. The audio feeds, which are by subscription, can allow listeners to hear their favorite radio programs on demand as they are fed to the portable device.

While digital radio has made nothing so visible as a dent in the American broadcast landscape, the UK is predicting that 13 million digital sets will be sold there by 2008, and the new technology is expected to all but replace analog radio broadcasting within a decade. The government is considering setting a “switch-off date” for the analog broadcasts, as most Western governments have done for TV signals, in an effort to speed the transition.

The rules that the Bush and Kerry campaigns attempted to impose on news networks covering their debates may have made for a good laugh at the politicians’ expense, but David Thomson says that the participants’ aversion to reaction shots can be lumped in with the movie and television industry’s move away from “two-shots” and other camera angles designed to emphasize the space around individuals. These days, it seems like close-ups are the only thing anyone cares about. “There was once a set of theories on film direction, or mise en scène, that attested to the aesthetics and the ethics of using spatial relationships in movies.”

“After four days of painstaking negotiations, technology and consumer groups said they have failed to reach a consensus with the entertainment industry on the language of the Induce Act, a proposed bill making it illegal to encourage copyright infringement.”

“The commercial web is 10 years old, yet the online publishing industry still hasn’t figured out how to measure accurately the number of people visiting each site. What’s at stake? More than $8 billion a year.”

The hottest shows on American television this fall aren’t reality shows, and they aren’t on HBO, or any other cable network. In fact, they’re good, old-fashioned over-the-air network programming, with emphasis on “good.” As it turns out, the networks that so many critics had all but dismissed as dinosaurs are still capable of drawing an audience, when they actually put a little effort into churning out high-quality programs.