Monday, September 19, 2016
CBC's Terry Milewski retires
He announced on Twitter: "Small news: I gotta go. After 38 years at CBC, I'm retiring. Still gonna show up often on air and online, so not going cold turkey but..."
Saturday, September 17, 2016
Walrus fiction editor quits over magazine’s push for ‘family-friendly’ stories
Nick Giovannetti writes in the Globe and Mail:
"One of Canada’s foremost magazines is embroiled in a battle over whether serious literature tackling serious subjects should also be family-friendly, leading to the resignation of The Walrus’s fiction editor and charges that politeness has gone too far at the publication.
"Nick Mount, the magazine’s fiction editor and an English professor at the University of Toronto, announced by e-mail on Friday morning that he had resigned after The Walrus’s management expressed “obscenity concerns” about publishing the words “crap” and “orgasm” in a work of fiction planned for an upcoming issue.
“'The publisher has decided that the magazine wants more family-friendly fiction,' he said in the e-mail, which went to a list of past contributors, including Margaret Atwood. 'There’s just not enough fiction in Canada that is both good and family-friendly. So I can’t be of much help to the magazine any more.'”
Friday, September 16, 2016
"Headlines my father told me" -- Judith Timson.
Judith Timson's touching musings about her dad, Ray Timson, on the CBC web page:
'My father died well before the age of Twitter. But Dad always spoke in tweets. He called them headlines: 'Race riots, Birmingham, firehoses, tragedy,' was Dad's brisk summation of a tumultuous chapter of the American civil rights movement. 'A dark night for Canada's finest,' telegraphed his outrage over a deadly loggers strike in Newfoundland. 'Bobby's down' came sideways out of his mouth as he hung up the phone after hearing about the mortal shooting of Robert F. Kennedy, brother to the already felled president. From a young age, I took this as normal parental discourse.
The story
'My father died well before the age of Twitter. But Dad always spoke in tweets. He called them headlines: 'Race riots, Birmingham, firehoses, tragedy,' was Dad's brisk summation of a tumultuous chapter of the American civil rights movement. 'A dark night for Canada's finest,' telegraphed his outrage over a deadly loggers strike in Newfoundland. 'Bobby's down' came sideways out of his mouth as he hung up the phone after hearing about the mortal shooting of Robert F. Kennedy, brother to the already felled president. From a young age, I took this as normal parental discourse.
The story
Thursday, September 15, 2016
Gallup poll: Public confidence in American media falls to all-time low
Politico reports that the American public’s trust in the media in 2016 has fallen to its lowest point since at least 1972, according to a new Gallup poll released Wednesday.
Thirty-two percent of the respondents in Gallup’s most recent national poll said that they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the mass media, an eight percentage-point drop compared to 2015. It’s the lowest point in Gallup’s polling history, which began asking respondents whether they had trust and confidence in the media in 1972.
Public trust in the media fell among respondents who identified as Democrats, Republicans and independents, but the decline in trust in the media was most pronounced among Republicans, whose confidence in the media dropped from 32 percent in 2015 to 14 percent in 2016.
“This is easily the lowest confidence among Republicans in 20 years,” according to the poll.
The drop in media trust and confidence was also apparent among both young and old respondents, according to the study. 2016 is the first time in 15 years that confidence in the media among Americans 50 and older fell below 40 percent.
The whole story
Thirty-two percent of the respondents in Gallup’s most recent national poll said that they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the mass media, an eight percentage-point drop compared to 2015. It’s the lowest point in Gallup’s polling history, which began asking respondents whether they had trust and confidence in the media in 1972.
Public trust in the media fell among respondents who identified as Democrats, Republicans and independents, but the decline in trust in the media was most pronounced among Republicans, whose confidence in the media dropped from 32 percent in 2015 to 14 percent in 2016.
“This is easily the lowest confidence among Republicans in 20 years,” according to the poll.
The drop in media trust and confidence was also apparent among both young and old respondents, according to the study. 2016 is the first time in 15 years that confidence in the media among Americans 50 and older fell below 40 percent.
The whole story
Friday, September 9, 2016
How the iPhone is killing the traditional camera
Om Malik writes in the New Yorker:
"Camera companies, like traditional phone manufacturers, dismissed the iPhone as a toy when it launched, in 2007. Nokia thought that the iPhone used inferior technology; the camera makers thought that it took lousy pictures. Neither thought that they had anything to worry about. Of course, neither anticipated the value of having a computer in your pocket, and what the camera folks, especially, didn’t anticipate was that, as the photographer Chase Jarvis puts it, the best camera is the one that’s with you. . . .
"There are now nearly a billion smartphones worldwide capturing selfies, birthday smiles, breakfast sandwiches, Tuscan villages, and cats. In the past, such photos were taken by a point-and-shoot camera. Even today, the interchangeable-lens cameras and high-end cameras have their fans, so demand for these monsters still exists. But for how long?"
The whole story
"Camera companies, like traditional phone manufacturers, dismissed the iPhone as a toy when it launched, in 2007. Nokia thought that the iPhone used inferior technology; the camera makers thought that it took lousy pictures. Neither thought that they had anything to worry about. Of course, neither anticipated the value of having a computer in your pocket, and what the camera folks, especially, didn’t anticipate was that, as the photographer Chase Jarvis puts it, the best camera is the one that’s with you. . . .
"There are now nearly a billion smartphones worldwide capturing selfies, birthday smiles, breakfast sandwiches, Tuscan villages, and cats. In the past, such photos were taken by a point-and-shoot camera. Even today, the interchangeable-lens cameras and high-end cameras have their fans, so demand for these monsters still exists. But for how long?"
The whole story
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