sundance

You can pry the steering wheel out of Chevy Volt owners cold, dead hands (despite fiery rumors)

Heard about the Chevy Volt fires? Seems like you’re most likely to answer “yes” to that question if a) you’re a true car geek, or b) you get your news from right-leaning media. Conservative commentators have latched onto news about fires in two of the vehicles after test crashes as proof of everything from the immaturity of the battery technology to logical outcome of government investment in the auto industry. In response, General Motors has not only worked closely with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on its preliminary investigation, but also offered Volt owners loaner cars and even buy-backs to address potential concerns.

Run for your life – it’s the shredded newspaper man!

I really love this new costume/sculpture “We are all here to do what we are all here to do,” by Fabio Lattanzi Antinori and Alicja Pytlewska. Resembling something that emerged from the imaginations of Maurice Sendak and Guillermo del Toro, it was constructed using “shredded newspapers found around East London” and is perhaps an unsubtle visual metaphor for the declining state of the traditional print news industry and the ongoing Murdoch/News International phone hacking scandal.

The media’s pornification of women

Here’s a fascinating, but not all that surprising study from the University of Buffalo: they recently analyzed more than 1,000 images of men and women on Rolling Stone covers over the course of 43 years (they chose Rolling Stone since it’s a well-established, pop culture media outlet) and found the following:

Not exactly breaking news: Sexy news anchors distract male viewers

In a new study that will surprise, well, no one we can think of, two researchers at Indiana University have found that attractive, dolled up lady newscasters make it harder for male viewers to retain the information of the broadcast. Heh, we said broadcast. We’re sure that this research will usher in a new wave of mousy, seriously dressed female news anchors — because the producers of these news shows really care how much information their viewers retain. Right?

Twitter’s top 10 most powerful tweets of 2010

Twitter rounded up their list of the top 10 most influential and powerful tweets this year. Although they might not be world leaders, nationally recognized reporters, or celebrities, here is my recommended short list of must-follow people on Twitter due to their excellent linkage or humor (or both!): jennydeluxe (memes, news, and lolz), CardiffGarcia (financial), [...]

Newspapers: not dead yet

Robert Gober’s “Newspaper” (1992)

Ever since the birth of online news, we’ve heard endless forecasts of the supposed doomsday of the newspaper industry, so now that web media is a daily part of most former newspaper-reader’s lives, is it true? Are newspapers really on the outs? It’s likely that even more local papers will go under – many already have. Big guns like The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post are all down a couple of percents – a slower decline than what was predicted three years ago. The future is still uncertain, but it’s not the quick death a lot of us feared it might be.

The oil spill’s over… right?

Heard much about the BP oil spill lately? Nope, me either… once the oil stopped spewing, the news also seemed to dry up. Time to move on, right… after all, there are crazy pastors in Florida to interview.

Not so fast.

Fewer E.D. ads! New teen-focused recommendations for this sex-soaked culture

Teens now spend a whopping seven hours per day on various forms of media. So the American Academy of Pediatrics just issued a revised policy statement, “Sexuality, Contraception, and the Media,” in the September 2010 print issue of Pediatrics (published online Aug. 30). In addition to calling for the creation of a national task force on children, adolescents and the media to be convened by child advocacy groups in conjunction with the CDC or National Institutes of Health, it includes updated recommendations for pediatricians and parents on how to deal with this sex-soaked culture. Among the new recommendations since 2001:

Sundance competition films: juicy, mopey, risky, arty?

The 2010 Sundance Film Festival won’t kick off for a few weeks, but the press is already dusting off its snow boots and readying for action. (“Should the Bagger rent a car in Sundance, or are the shuttles where all the good gossip is?” wonders The New York Times’ Melena Ryzik, the new Carpetbagger blogger and a festival first-timer. One reader suggests a Norwegian kicksled.)

Culture wars: The New York Post vs. the Standard Hotel

The end of August is always a slow season for news–and nowhere is that more evident than in the New York Post’s extensive coverage of the Chelsea Standard Hotel “controversy.” This past Monday, the Post ran a story on a recently discovered feature of New York’s newly opened High Line park. In addition to offering [...]

The book industry’s slow farewell

In an excellent long essay in The Nation entitled “The Long Goodbye? The Book Business and its Woes,” the legendary editor Elisabeth Sifton writes about the decline of the book industry from her perspective as a towering figure in the literary world over the last several decades. Sifton has edited dozens of books you’ve either [...]

A peek inside nytimes.com’s research and development lab

A guy from Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab paid a visit recently to the R&D studio at The New York Times, where the paper’s “design integration editor,” Nick Bilton, gave a demonstration of all sorts of cool future-of-media technologies, including electronic ink, flexible screens, and highly customizable newspaper apps built on the Adobe Air platform. Nick [...]

Garry Trudeau on “journotwits”

Mediabistro’s Webnewser blog has an exclusive interview with Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau about the media world’s obsession with Twitter. Trudeau, who generally thinks the microblogging service is a useless time-suck, devoted a recent series of strips to the Twitter experiments of the hapless journalist Roland Hedley. Here’s what Trudeau has to say about real-life tweeting [...]