Category: media

“Gossip columnist Roger Friedman wants more than $5 million in lost wages and damages from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for firing him after he reviewed the company’s ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ based on a pirated copy of the movie. In a suit filed in New York State Supreme Court on Monday, Friedman says he was fired from his $250,000-a-year job (no, that’s not a typo) as a columnist and contributor to Fox News illegally.”

“Los Angeles Unified schools made $1.756 million last year from filming, led by the 48 days at Birmingham High in Van Nuys, 47 days at University High in West Los Angeles and 34 days at Le Conte Middle School in Hollywood, according to FilmLA, the nonprofit that coordinates on-location permits for the city and much of Los Angeles County. … But El Segundo High holds a special place in the hearts of filmmakers,” whose frequent presence in the area is angering the neighbors.

“When [the Monty Python film] was released 30 years ago it was described as a motion picture destined to offend nearly two-thirds of the civilised world and severely annoy the other third. In 1980, Glasgow councillors agreed and refused to allow it the 15 certificate agreed by the British Board of Film Censors. Instead they insisted it could only be shown as an X-rated adult movie, resulting in it never being screened in the city.”

Maybe the answer to newspapers’ ills isn’t a new business model. Maybe it’s as straightforward as rewriting copyright law. First Amendment lawyer David Marburger and his economics professor brother, Daniel, “propose changing federal copyright law to give the original newsgatherer a period — they’d like it to be 24 hours — in which the news item would be available only on the originator’s Web site. “

“The E! channel streams a feed of celebrity tweets across the lower third of its screen, while some CNN newscasters have practically made Twitter their co-anchor. Over at MTV, the new show It’s On with Alexa Chung allows viewers to type a message in Twitter and watch it appear on their living-room sets.” This despite the fact that “relatively recent history is littered with futile attempts to integrate television with the latest technological fad.”

“Has technology’s ability to deliver information at such a rapid pace corrupted us? It’s one thing to marvel at how social media sites have helped spread Iranian news we might not have attained due to censorship — and with such timeliness; it’s quite another to have become a culture that prizes speed over confirmed facts. Have our standards for accountability dissolved?”

“What was the Susan Boyle spectacle, that chunk of culture that held us, for days at least, so firmly rapt? The answers still lie in the video, a small, insidious masterpiece that really should be watched several times for its accidental commentary on popular misery, the concept of ‘expectation’ and how cultures congratulate themselves.”

“Hollywood’s movie studios, hopeful that marquee-name actors would push their summer box-office receipts to record levels, are finding that the heavyweights aren’t winning over audiences like they used to. With all but a couple of big-budget films already opened, the summer of 2009 is shaping up to be one of the worst on record for Hollywood’s A-list talent.”

“Two front runners in the contest, Team Pragmatic Theory and Team Bellkor in Chaos, joined forces and submitted an algorithm that was 10.05 percent better than the one Netflix uses to recommend movies to its subscribers. The result was published on the Netflix Prize leader board on Friday.”

“Why not include ITV and Channel 4 drama within the definition of public-service broadcasting – because at the moment the BBC is heading towards a virtual monopoly of drama production.”