Category: media

At Cannes, yes: “Historically, film markets have been a breeding ground for macho-infused action fare, but increasingly the other gender is the focus.”

Director Dee Rees: “This is a woman who is complicated, and even the way she’s talked about is complicated. And no two people necessarily agree on who she was or how she was. And if I couldn’t answer the ‘how,’ I wanted to answer the ‘why.’ I wanted to understand what’s inside her, so I started with her lyrics, with the songs she wrote, to try to really understand her as an artist.”

“Though membership has always been a core part of public media, over the past several years, public radio has been grappling with new questions concerning membership and listener loyalty. The traditional form of building membership and leveraging organizational loyalty — the pledge drive — has declined in effectiveness, and new conversations are beginning about how to recruit and retain members who access content off-air.”

“Nobody would have been shocked if, as Letterman aged, he simply tried to cling to his younger irreverence, flinging his 68-year-old self to Velcro walls, like in the old days. That’s what TV does to people who want to stay on TV, and it’s usually a cringefest. Instead, Letterman began a quiet but noticeable transformation to a broader, more open, human version of himself.”

“Instead of buying a few videos and watching them again and again, we’re now binge-watching entire seasons of shows in a sitting, which ends up creating a bigger carbon footprint overall. This trend extends to other industries as well. For example, according to the report, publishers now consume more energy as a result of their data center usage than they did through their use of printing presses.”

“The human mission has been lost: these are faceless Stormtrooper movies, unleashed in waves upon the presumed-to-be-faceless Stormtrooper audience. Stories are an affirmation of our human value; they teach us what life means, make and keep us human. Marvel, by removing the human from its storytelling, may be bringing about the end of story altogether.”

“A couple of weeks ago, NPR and two of its most influential member stations, WNYC and WBEZ, invited a large group of media and marketing people to Le Poisson Rouge, a nightclub in Greenwich Village, for an event called ‘Hearing is Believing.’ … Ira Glass, the host of This American Life and producer of Serial, told a reporter for AdAge, ‘My hope is that we can move away from a model of asking listeners for money and join the free market.'”

The ACLU is giving it try. “There are a lot of parties involved in putting together a film,” Robinson said. “If they do bring a lawsuit, one of the challenges of plaintiffs in court would be showing who’s responsible for the hiring decision. The studios will do what’s minimally necessary to avoid government scrutiny.”

“Nearly 25 years since they were first broadcast across Canada, Heritage Minutes have got their swagger back. Their original target audience – young, impressionable Canadians – is now a huge, digitally savvy slice of the country’s makeup, and there’s little they crave more than nostalgia and parody.”

“The problem is that being able to perpetuate yourself is not the same as having a distinctive mission. KCTS is a tax-exempt organization licensed to use the public airwaves in the public interest. Our region deserves better. Only a little more than half of KCTS spending is on program services. The rest goes for fundraising and administration.”