Category: media

“Unions criticised the cuts as ‘totally unnecessary’ and ‘politically motivated,'” while the BBC’s director-general said the corporation was “putting quality first” in making “significant cuts to its website, radio services and imported programmes,” allowing “an extra £600m [to be] diverted into higher quality programme-making.”

“The series, commissioned by the A&E network, would follow an ensemble cast of train conductors, station agents and other subway workers as they handle track fires, angry customers and the grind of running the country’s biggest mass transit system. But as with many of the authority’s major projects, the show is now facing a delay.”

“Hollywood filmmakers, whether they know it or not, have become steadily more adroit at shaping basic movie structure to match the pulsatile, half-smooth, half-raggedy way we attend to the world around us.” The basic shot structure resembles “a rough but recognizably wave-like pattern called 1/f,” a.k.a. pink noise.

“The BBC’s plans to shut two radio stations and close half its website were in chaos yesterday as musicians vowed to stop the closure of 6 Music and unions threatened to strike over job cuts. The Times revealed yesterday that the corporation was to publish proposals next month to scale back its operations.”

“As the Academy Awards draw near, let’s take a moment to applaud the bad films that give us perspective, the zero-star efforts that put four-star masterpieces in context, the campy, mistake-riddled, poorly acted celluloid train wrecks we laugh at yet watch intently.”

“TV Tropes is a wiki — a site anyone in the world can contribute to and edit, like Wikipedia. Since its founding in 2004, more than 42,000 people have volunteered to be “tropers” like Barbara — a mixture of fans, writers, educators and amateur academics smitten by pop culture and accessing their inner Joseph Campbell. The site now gets more than 2 million unique visitors a month.”

“Do we really need a Tonight Show at all? Is anyone even interested any more in the ancient pre-bed television ritual of celebrity preening, endless anecdotes and shameless plugs, regardless of who happens to be sitting behind the desk?”

“Union leaders and company chiefs have been quietly consulting members, reviewing data and thinking deeply about what went wrong the last time labor and management opened a major round of talks, nearly three years ago. They are looking ahead to a collision that could cripple the film industry in the first half of 2011.”

“Jacques Audiard’s powerful prison drama “Un Prophete” (A Prophet) swept the board at the “Cesar” awards on Saturday, picking up the best film, best actor and best director prizes at France’s annual version of the Oscars.”

“To a certain extent, the methodology is fairly straightforward. You take a lot of audio from a speaker. You then cut that up into tiny little pieces. Each piece is a little sound. … In order to then produce a new sentence, you then take those sounds, you rearrange them, and you stick them back together again.”