Category: media

Simple. “These holiday movies are proliferating because they’re cheap to produce, generate strong ratings and lots of advertising revenue for the television networks. Hallmark parent Crown Media Holdings credited its holiday programming for helping to spur an 11% increase in advertising revenue last year to $328 million.”

“Listening among Morning Edition‘s audience, for example, has declined 20 percent among people under 55 in the past five years. As audiences drift to newer on-demand audio sources such as podcasts and streaming, the bonds with local stations – and the contributions that come with them – may be fraying.”

“Jessica Jones” showrunner Melissa Rosenberg: “It changes quite a bit for cable. It becomes more about continuing story lines than it does about case-of-the-week. Because you’re not a slave to commercials and a week in-between each episode, you have all that real estate you normally spend recapping, going to storytelling. So you find yourself really pushing the edges even further than you might otherwise. Netflix is very much into pushing the edges. We went dark.”

“Sony’s rank and file had their job descriptions scrambled and their private information cast to the wind. But for many of the contractors working on the peripheries of the organization, the hack seemed to breeze through like tumbleweed.”

“If the luminous Hollywood of my childhood was obliterated for good, it all started with ‘Jaws’ in the summer of 1975, which would devour half a billion dollars at the box office. America fell in love with the blockbuster, and Hollywood got hooked on the cohort of 15-year-old boys. It has never wavered in this obsession.”

Overwhelmingly, top black film actresses have found far more interesting fare and appreciation in television

“In sum, these are the main problems with “Paintings of Cole”: it was inconveniently shown on the Upper West Side, written by a guy I envy, screened by a cute intern whose name was too confusing to remember, based on an idea that I poorly executed in grad school, and praised by the Times, which rejected me.”

As we prepared for this cover, we discovered precisely ZERO actresses of color in the Oscar conversation — at least in the weeks in early September when the roundtables are put together, weeks before the actual ceremony takes place and months before the nominations are announced January 14.

“It’s definitely a sign that things have gotten weird when a major publication is aware of its own lack of imagination, indulges it anyway because it’s the easiest thing to do, and then tries to quell the criticism before anyone has had a chance to see the result.”

“Chester’s film takes on one of the biggest ideas in science, Einstein’s theory of relativity. With cartoonish graphics drawn by hand and props from everyday life, like a bowl of popcorn and a moving minivan, Chester explains what Einstein’s famous theory is all about — and why it means that people traveling close to the speed of light age slowly compared to people on Earth.”