Category: media

NPR stations are well on their way as the leading radio news source in 20 of the 50 or so Nielsen PPM markets according to NPR. In those 20 markets, NPR has more weekly cume listeners than their commercial news/talk competitors.

The awfulness of Rotten Tomatoes and Cinemascore. (But he does give a defense of mother!, so there’s that.)

“Without Mr. Weinstein, this studio, already struggling at the box office and hobbled by an exodus of senior staff members in recent years, is in serious trouble. The movie and television company’s other founder and co-chairman, Bob Weinstein, has a substantial track record running Dimension Films, a label dedicated to horror movies and family fare, like the Spy Kids franchise. [David] Glasser, sometimes referred to in Hollywood as the third Weinstein brother, is an experienced executive. But Harvey Weinstein is the one who called – or screamed – the shots, often pushing the company forward by sheer force of will.”

“Late Thursday, Harvey Weinstein called top Hollywood talent agents to ask for a substantial favor: to please speak up in his defense as he contended with sexual harassment allegations stretching back decades. When none did, and with the remnants of the Weinstein Company’s board moving to fire him as the studio’s co-chairman, Mr. Weinstein got more frantic. On Sunday, he sent an email to agents and studio executives that said he was ‘desperate’ for their help.”

Brenda Barnes succeeds longtime KING FM General Manager Jennifer Ridewood, who was at the helm of the station when it transitioned to a listener-supported public radio station in 2011. KING FM now has more than 15,000 members and last year garnered $4.4 million in revenue, up from $2.1 million in 2010, before the transition occurred, according to the station.

Netflix paid a lot of money – but it’s not going to meet Canadian content guidelines, and it will not make promises about French-language productions, either. How do Canadians in the TV and movie production industries feel? Hm: “In Canada, we have created regulations and rules by which companies are allowed to access our Canadian people and marketplace. Netflix and the other over-the-top services are not necessarily contributing to that content creation.”

The history of African American women on late night is limited but prestigious – previous hosts have been Whoopi Goldberg, Mo’Nique, and Wanda Sykes. So Thede’s new The Rundown is “both a risky proposition and a potential breakthrough for BET, which has a sporadic history of late-night talk-show programming, and for Ms. Thede, who was most recently the head writer and an occasional performer on Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore.”

Yup, AIM started it all. “You kids don’t understand. You will never understand. You walk around in habitats of text, pop-up cathedrals of social language whose cornerstone is the rectangle in your pocket. The words and the alert sounds swirl around you and you know how to read them and hear them because our culture — that we made — taught you how. We were the first generation to spend two hours typing at our closest friends instead of finishing our homework, parsing and analyzing and worrying over ‘u were so funny in class today’ or ‘nah lol youre pretty cool.'”