Tag Archives: Media

Enhance! Enhance! Zoom! Enhance!

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This ain’t “CSI.” NPR this morning on how investigators use technology to sift through digital photos and video for evidence in cases like the Boston Marathon bombing:

In the nearly 17 years since Atlanta’s Olympic Park bombing, technology has transformed how large-scale investigations can work. Federal officials in Boston reportedly sifted through more than 10 terabytes of data — much of it images and video recorded at the marathon site.

Listen to the complete story here.

Also: The Verge looks at the online witch hunt for the bombing suspects and that awful, ill-advised New York Post cover photo.

Funeral Today for Journalist Bob McCord

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The funeral for journalist Robert McCord is set for today. Arkansas Business has details here, which includes an account of McCord’s work to establish the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, which, despite the state Legislature’s best efforts, remains among the strongest in the country.

Above is how I first met McCord, on Little Rock CBS affiliate KTHV-TV, Channel 11, where, for a time, he wrote and delivered commentaries. I’d meet in person years later, after graduating high school, going to college and attending SPJ events. He was always an exceptionally nice and thoughtful person, and to say he’ll be missed is understatement.

The Onion Does It Again

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The Onion, yesterday. A fake column by New York Post Editor Col Allan:

And yet, there are still people—literally millions of them—who actually have to ask why we didn’t simply slow down and wait until the whole story came in so that we could run an accurate, fact-checked article that didn’t exaggerate the number of dead by 9 or 10 people. To that, I say: How could you even think about accurately reporting a tragedy at a time like this? When those pipe bombs or whatever they were—I believe they were pipe bombs—went off, we weren’t wasting time making routine inquiries with law enforcement officials, or relying on the reporting of those actually on the ground, or maintaining even a tenuous grasp on the journalistic conventions of truth and integrity. We were doing what needed to be done: dashing off haphazard, poorly sourced yellow journalism that included an entirely speculative report on a Saudi national who we strongly suggested was behind the attack without a modicum of supportive evidence.

And yes, Col Allan really is the editor of the Post.

Also:

The Vanishing Bomb Suspect: How the New York Post Scooped Reality [Gawker]

Erik Wemple on the Post, “12 dead” and more [Washington Post]

In Which the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Tries to Bully Malco Theaters

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Box office bomb.

Box office bomb.

Sour grapes much? At right, a real house that’s running in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in northwest Arkansas, where Malco Theaters has decided to stop running its movie listings in the daily newspaper because, well, THE INTERNET. And really, smartphones.

Romenesko notes it here, asking, “Does anyone still use newspapers to check movie times?” The answer is “yes” only if the last time you did so was to see when “Hope Springs” was playing and you were 60.

Otherwise, it’s “no,” because it’s 2013 and everyone uses smartphones and apps like Fandango to find where films are playing, even to buy tickets before even showing up at the theater. Imagine that.

The real question Romenesko should be asking is, “Why would any newspaper use house ads to bully advertisers?” Is this the kind of business relationship the newspaper has with all its clients?

(H/T to Larry Harry, via Facebook. See a photo of the ad in print here.)

SCOTUSblog on How CNN, Fox Botched the Supreme Court’s Health Care Ruling

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For media nerds like me, it really doesn’t get any better than SCOTUSblog’s minute-by-minute account of how CNN and Fox News botched coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on health care reform.

LOL’d: Huffington Post, even with its own reporter on the ground at the court, just couldn’t resist being the Huffington Post:

Elsewhere, others are picking up the story from CNN and Fox.  Back at the Court, the Huffington Post’s reporter, Mike Sacks, has not yet filed a story on the ruling.  Their social media team does not wait, however.  Taking the news from CNN without attribution, it tweets – “BREAKING: Individual mandate has been ruled unconstitutional by Supreme Court.”

One of the day’s many facepalms, for sure. (Drudge made a similar play.)

Video: Man in Arkansas Pulls a Gun on WREG TV Crew

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Well, it’s no weatherman (not) getting punched in the face. But it’s a shade more harrowing, when WREG-TV, Channel 3, TV reporter April Thompson and her cameraman find themselves in Joiner, Ark., (Mississippi County) investigating a suspicious death, and happening upon a decidedly unfriendly local. According to Thompson:

We do what we always do in these cases, we go out to find the details. But what we found was an angry man with a gun.

That man, Brandon Odom, could now face an aggravated assault charge, a class D felony, according to police.

More

Video: WREG’s April Thompson has a gun pulled on her

‘Talking to Network Executives Isn’t Like Talking to Siri’

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Apple TV

Apple TV ... today

Andy Ihnatko in Macworld today, contemplating the hot topic du jour, the full-on Apple TV:

Siri, iCloud, and most importantly deals to license content in such a way that the user won’t feel like they have to feed coins into the side of the screen every time they want to catch a sitcom, will define any Apple HDTV.

That last one might be the single toughest problem to solve. Talking to network executives isn’t like talking to Siri. Siri is designed for rational, productive conversations in plain, comprehensible language.

Zing! And of course 100 percent correct.

That’s the just the capper to the column, which is worth a read. In it, Ihnatko wrestles with the real question in all this speculation: What does a real Apple-made HD TV set accomplish that the current Apple TV form factor can’t? Do we really even need an Apple-made HD TV set?

Shawn Blanc thinks on that a bit, and thinks there’s room for both. We have Mac minis and MacBooks, after all. Sounds fine to me.

At any rate, the TV space is one where Apple knows it has to be in a much bigger way than it already is. Roku, Boxee, Hulu, Netflix. Of course Google. And now Sony. A big fight’s brewing.

Dallas Cowboys Among First ‘Google+ Pages’

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Google Plus Dallas Cowboys

A Page in sports history.

Google+ rolls out Pages. More stuff to ignore!

Kidding. But seriously, I’m rarely on this thing, but you can find me here, for what it’s worth.

Meanwhile, not everyone can sign up for Pages yet, much to my relief. I already have a hand in overseeing some of the day job’s dozen or so Facebook Pages. I’m not looking forward to the additional, uh, interaction.

Anyway, you can see the Dallas Cowboys’ Page here, along with a welcome video from owner and Arkansan Jerry Jones. Always on the bleeding edge, that Jerry.

Arkansas’ P. Allen Smith Part of YouTube’s Original Programming Effort

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I seem to recall former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at one point saying something along the lines of “Google isn’t in the content business.”

Times have changed of course, and Schmidt is no longer Google’s CEO. And over at YouTube, they’re very much in the business of original content, at least starting next month.

That’s when the world’s leading video website rolls out about 100 channels of new content programmed by celebrities and media entities like Pitchfork TV, Slate, the Wall Street Journal and — hey! — Arkansas’ own garden guru, P. Allen Smith:

Smith’s channel will begin streaming in January. It will feature segments on home and garden tips filmed at his 567-acre Moss Mountain Farm, 20 minutes northwest of Pinnacle Mountain in central Arkansas.

Smith, an author and contributor to NBC’s “The Today Show” and “The Weather Channel,” already hosts programs on public television, including “P. Allen Smith’s Garden Home” and “P. Allen Smith’s Garden to Table.”

Smith’s programming will stream on a channel under the eHow Home brand, owned by Demand Media.

All of this of course part of Google’s broader effort to take on cable TV and, obviously, give those Google TV early adopters something to watch.

UPDATE: Speaking of Google and cable TV. Wow.

Frommer: The Trouble with ‘Apps As TV Channels’

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Dan Frommer lays out the myriad obstacles to the “Apps As TV Channels” model everyone is talking about. Bottom line:

The people running TV networks are not dummies. They may be slow to adopt new technology, but they’re not stupid. They saw what “working with Apple” did to the music industry. And they are set on making sure that if Internet distribution and new technologies eventually redraw the entire TV distribution chain, it happens on their terms and on their schedule.

Basically: It’s all about preserving their existing business models.

His full argument here.