The drivetime listeners are gone, sending NPR’s radio ratings into the sub-sub-basement. Yet NPR is reaching 10 percent more people than at the same time last year. What gives? “Bringing a younger, more diverse audience into the NPR fold means reaching listeners on the platforms they’re already on — whether that’s putting podcasts on Spotify, music on YouTube, or newsy explainers on TikTok. … Executives are putting two and two together from the demographic reports and, bubbling up from the bottom, junior producers and interns want to produce content that their digital-native friends will actually see.” – Nieman Lab
Category: media
Are Suburbs Inherently Scary?
Horror movies sure seem to think so. A lot of them seem to exhibit “this idea that if you have enough free time, you’re going to just start rounding people up and killing them.” – Wired
Advertisers And Media Outlets Are Fighting, With Billions Of Dollars At Stake, And Nobody Really Knows How To Fix It
“It’s easy to pin the current squabbles on the coronavirus. Look more closely, and you’ll see evidence of deeper frustrations at play that marketers and media outlets have known about for years but haven’t done enough to fix. … Since the industry agreed to changes in the way Nielsen measures TV ratings in 2007, viewership patterns have grown exponentially more complex — and everyone, it seems, has a different vision of how to calculate the number of people who watch a favorite comedy or drama; a sports event; and a newscast.” – Variety
MGM Remakes One Of Its Divisions As Studio Run By And For BIPOC Moviemakers
As one of the authors of UCLA’s annual Hollywood Diversity Report put it, “There are almost no people of color in the film industry who have the power to say, ‘This movie is getting made and by this person.” Now MGM is taking a concrete step to address that: it’s turning its Orion Pictures division over to 36-year-old Alana Mayo (“a person who is a woman and Black and queer,” as she puts it) to produce films by, and about, underrepresented people and groups. – The New York Times
New Guide To Shooting COVID-Safe Sex Scenes Says To Go Back To Hays Code
Directors UK (the Brit equivalent of the Directors Guild) has published Intimacy in the Time of COVID-19, a new set of guidelines for the planning, staging and recording of sex scenes, starts with suggesting that “the director, writer and producer review the scenes together and decide if the intimate act needs to be shown.” And yes, the guide explicitly suggests looking to the Hays Code as a model. – Variety
Behind The Scenes Fights About Race On CBS Show Lead To Writers’ Departures
Now that work is underway for the second season of “All Rise,” which stars Simone Missick as an idealistic Los Angeles judge, five writers from the original staff of seven are gone. Among those who quit were the program’s three highest-ranking writers of color. – The New York Times
How NPR Is Captive To Its Core Audience
How does framing stories for this audience shape how public radio stations tell stories? At every stage of story production—from the reporter’s “pitch” to their editor, through the process of reporting, editing, and airing—powerful figures within the newsroom invoke “the audience” and effectively restrict stories that challenge prevailing notions of racial progress. – American Prospect
Why America Needs Its Version Of The BBC
One partial solution to the decline of media that often gets ignored—yet has the potential to both alleviate the deepening crisis and also help restore public trust in the media as a whole—is for the government to create and finance a truly public media system. The idea of public media is often conflated with state-run media in the eyes of skittish libertarians, but public media systems in other democracies have proven entirely capable of retaining editorial independence despite being government-funded. – The New Republic
Male Film Critics Still Get Published Twice As Much As Female Ones: Study
“Female film critics contributed 35% of the film reviews across print, broadcast and online outlets, up 1% from 2019, according to the report, titled Thumbs Down 2020: Film Critics and Gender, and Why It Matters. Though the increase in numbers of female film critics seems marginal, the numbers show a marked improvement from the 73% male to 27% female breakdown in 2016.” – Variety
Why Are There So Few Black Directors In The Criterion Collection?
“In such an expansive catalog, encompassing films from more than 40 countries, the relative absence of African-American filmmakers stands out. There are, for example, more directors in the Criterion Collection with the last name Anderson than there are African-Americans.” Criterion president Peter Becker acknowledges the problem: “There’s nothing I can say about it that will make it OK. The fact that things are missing, and specifically that Black voices are missing, is harmful, and that’s clear. We have to fix that.” – The New York Times