All images via Grammy.com – Michael Caulfield / WireImage.com
For those who sit on Twitter all day, like myself, you may have heard the news amongst all the iPad kafuffle -
In more exciting news, Rough Review will be featuring THE exclusive interview with editor, Letitia Burrell, where she will be answering all those tricky questions plaguing the minds of confused readers – where did you go? Where’s my subscription? Are you back for good?
So, if YOU have a question to pose to Dujour, however curly it may be, now is your chance.
Post your questions for Dujour in the comment section below with your name and other info (twitter, website, etc).
Please try to keep them clean =)
For someone who has all three above, I’m decidedly unimpressed and perplexed at the amount of Twitter buzz that I’ve witnessed today. For some unknown reason, today is a day where people seem most concerned about the decline of print media.
What was that sorry? Oh print media dies TODAY! *slaps forehead*, silly me, I forgot!
Let’s all rush out and get our iPad’s quicksmart.
Don’t believe me? Here’s some evidence from the past couple of days:
8 Reasons Women Should Be Excited for Apple’s ‘iPad’ @ Jezebel.comIn less than one week, Apple is expected to unveil some thingamajig that will be like a Kindle from heaven and supposedly save print media. What this new gadget might be called is where people might have an issue.
Recent evidence suggests that this divine new product will be called the iPad. Obviously, this presents some immediately troubling connotations — as opposed to a word like “notepad,” a single letter “i” doesn’t give us enough emotional distance from the “pad” part of the package.
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I never thought I’d see this day come.
As most Melburnians will now know, our former state Minister for Transport and Arts, Lynne Kosky, resigned this morning.
Well, yay!
My hatred has been well documented in VCE SACS, letters to editors and plastered across many different blogging platforms. I suppose this could explain the influx of texts I received today from my family and friends upon hearing the news – they all thought of me, lol.
Though I despised her various stupid remarks, poor management of Melbourne’s public transport and how she gave women in parliament a bad name, you do have the give the gal some respect for sticking around despite all the bullshit that’s been mercilessly flung her way. Clearly, she’s got some balls. Or she’s just more stupid than everyone thought.
However, I never did actually send my angry letter to her, nor did I ever get the chance to meet her in the flesh. I’ve come oh-so-very close twice before, one memorable time in August, 2008:
After over a year of not-so-silent hate, I was finally presented with an opportunity to meet my arch-nemesis in the flesh: Lynne Kosky.
My Dad’s building every so often houses art and there was to be a celebratory ‘do’ in honour of their latest acquisition of some Japanese Art.
Excited enough about receiving an invitiation to the unveiling, I never expected to hear that apparently, my enemy just HAPPENS to be, inaddition to a complete and utter incompetent failure at her job, an expert on Japanese art who had been invited to say a few words at said unveiling.
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Image via dhammza
You may have sensed yesterday that I have a bit of skepticism when it comes to original end-of-year articles in our newspapers and magazines.
Far too often is it about the best bodies of the year, the worst and best dressed and the most memorable personalities- after a while, it gets all too repetitive and at times, a little too negative for my liking.
In light of this, I was pleasantly surprised by the Herald Sun TV Guide’s offering in the form of their 2010 TV Wish List in which four staff writers take a critical eye to all that was wrong, and oh-so-right with Australian television programming over the past year. It’s light-hearted, funny and looks to the future for positive television change.
However, the comments online in response to the article indicate the best part of the list – the discussion and debate surrounding today’s television. Agree, or disagree, at least the format is a welcome change from yet another piece about the most memorable moments of the year…
Kyle Sandilands, Two and a Half Men, 30 Rock – what’s on your TV wish list?
Colin Vickery, Siobhan Duck, Geoff Shearer and Jasmin Orr
Herald Sun, December 31, 2009
Each week, the Guide’s Your Say page lets you share your opinion on what you love or loathe on TV. As we enter a new year, we offer our TV wish list for 2010.1 ONE EPISODE OF TWO AND A HALF MEN A WEEK
TEN episodes of this Charlie Sheen sitcom is nine too many. We’re willing to decree this by government legislation if necessary – for humanity’s sake.
2 NO MORE COOKING SHOWS
WE KNOW MasterChef Australia was a huge hit, but does that mean every network has to ram more cooking shows down our throats in 2010? My Kitchen Rules, Poh’s Kitchen and Come Dine With Me Australia are about to be added to a second series of MasterChef and even Junior MasterChef. Stop – we have indigestion.
Read the rest of the article here.
*slams head against wall*
However, my protest this evening is not about the ubiquity of Tiger, but more the round-about arguments that keep getting thrown at me regarding the right to privacy of celebrities.
You want to be famous? Fine, if you’re good at what you do, you’ll be photographed. You’ll be followed. And your privacy will be invaded. Be good, wear pants at all time and you should escape unscathed.
My point (I do have one) is that I have a bone to pick with the media. Today on The View, the gals were talking about how the camera crew outside of Tiger’s house crossed a line when they filmed his mother-in-law being wheeled on a stretcher to hospital. It was a private moment, it was argued, that should not have been captured by outsiders. It is none of our business.
So what do they do? They show the footage again. Way to prove a point, ladies.
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I was supposed to be writing my third of four essays today. On media ownership concentration and media regulation in Australia. Granted, I’ve been patting myself on the back for my lovely organisation skills – and when I’ve been productive – but today I dropped the ball a bit. Instead, I went shopping.
Upon my arrival home, I checked my inbox for important emails (there were none, of course) and then proceeded to sift through the list of daily newsletters. Today, The Australian Media section for the week comes out and the top story?
I suppose it’s the media gods way of telling me that I should get back to work. Hmph.
It seems that the Ralph Lauren Photoshop scandal is continuing to wreak havoc, sparking a whole – not entirely new – debate about the ethics of photo manipulation.
Randy Cohen of The New York Times writes that -
It is commonplace that women are pressured to meet an artificial standard of beauty. These ads affect men too, giving them false expectations of how women look. Now technology makes that standard unobtainable even by professional beauties, as is evident in paired photographs, pre- and post-Photoshop, of Jessica Alba, Keira Knightley and even, anomalously, Andy Roddick.
French parliamentarians have called not for a ban but for warning labels on manipulated images. The representative Valérie Boyer, a leading proponent of such a law, sees it as an ordinary matter of truth in advertising. “Rules on food-labeling let consumers know the origins of the contents and the presence of things like additives and preservatives,” she said. What’s wrong with “informing them when photographs have also been modified from their original form?”
Personally, I don’t think it’s about the truth in advertising at all. Clearly, when we look down at our average female bodies with lumps and bumps, we KNOW that alien-like proportions aren’t the norm. We KNOW that these images have been altered and we KNOW that what you see is not necessarily what you get in real life.
So Obama’s under a little bit of scrutiny it seems. Part of me is happy to know the wonder child is getting held to his promises, the other is feeling a bit sorry for the poor guy.
This morning, a blog article arrived in my inbox entitled “The Obama Show” by Stanley Fish for the New York Times. It outlines, for those who follow US politics (and how can you not these days…) the going-ons with the Obama world over the past few months. After detailing the depressing side of life for Obama, he writes -
But there is a surprising upside to all this bad news: because he is the object of unceasing criticism, Obama is also the object of unceasing attention. Day after day and night after night his is the face we see and the voice we hear. (On Sunday, we could have seen and heard him on five networks.) Like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, he bestrides the political landscape like a colossus.
- Stanley Fish , “The Obama Show”, NYTimes Blog, September 21 2009.
Oooh, how attractive and ruggedly masculine. So I continued to read on, it was interesting and thought provoking, raised some valid points here and there and so forth. I moved on from that to the next article and didn’t think too much about it beyond the one minute I spent reading it.
That is, until this was forwarded on to me -
Clearly, there’s no point in denying that this latter example sums it all up in a much snazzier fashion. And, I’ve watched it four times already.
Old school journalism, despite being in blog-format, seems to have lost my vote this time. I feel like such a dirty rotten traitor to my peers and mentors. I’m terribly sorry, I will try to resist the Obama Superhero image next time, I really will.
The death of the newspaper – YAWN
I’m getting rather tired of this conversation, to be quite frank. Maybe this is solely due to the fact that I’ve overloaded myself with three core Media subjects this semester, or simply because I’m completing a media degree, but whatevs. We know it’s going to happen – newspapers, in their print form, WILL die unless an alternative revenue stream is sourced.
Advertising isn’t bringing in the big bucks no more! And besides all that, fewer and fewer of us are purchasing physical newspapers in favour of iPhones, Blackberries, laptops and more – who needs to burden those around us on trains with huge broadsheets just to get a few simple facts??
Despite all this, everyone seems very sad about the elusive ‘death’ to Newspapers as we know them. Yet the problem is, no one seems to want to do anything to help the flailing industry.
According to Mashable, an apparent array of Murdoch haters, News Corp WILL charge for their online and mobile news services.
“Newspapers are finding themselves in tough economic circumstances, so it’s no surprise that News Corp is dead set on monetizing their digital content, with CEO Rupert Murdoch recently saying that his company is planning to “charge for all our news websites.”
In a somewhat surprising move, it turns out the monetization strategy is being applied to mobile consumption of content as well. Murdoch went on the record at a recent conference saying that WSJ readers should expect to pay $2/week for mobile content using the BlackBerry or iPhone WSJ application.
Application subscribers will be charged $2 per week, though subscribers to both print and online will not be charged extra. The charges are expected to be implemented sometime in the next few months, as
Murdoch believes that “news is more valuable than ever.”
- Murdoch’s Latest Money Grab: Charge for Mobile Access to WSJ, September 16th, 2009 | by Jennifer Van Grove
Unsurprisingly, the comments in reply to the post adamantly stated, “I will not pay for my news when I get it for free!” (in a nutshell).
Here lies the problem – the whole reason news has moved online is that it is more accessible on the go, more instant and up-to-date and, above all else, the internet is a free, user generated medium. It was designed to allow for a free exchange of information and ideas. In charging for online content, Murdoch is challenging the medium itself.
With this in mind, would I pay for my news online? You know, if I had to fork out $2 a week to use a news app, I’d probably find a way around it. However, if I were to be charged to access an online newspaper, I’d probably do it. If not, I’d purchase the physical paper itself. But this model will only work, of course, if collectively, all papers decided to charge for their content. Readers will then have to decide if they value Murdoch paper’s content enough to pay for it?
It depends on readership and demographics -
Readers of The Wall Street Journal (think investors, bankers, fund managers- the financially knowledgeable) may be willing to pay for content, but readers of The Sun are most likely not willing to pay. This is due to the fact that for people involved in finance, the cost of having this information is miniscule compared to the possible gains that may be made by having that information. For the average reader of The Sun, the information provided to them is purely for enjoyment or interest. There are, in most cases, no possible gains directly related to having that information, therefore they are not willing to pay for it.
- Murdoch Will Lead News Corp. To Its Death. by Michael Moore Jones September 16, 2009
It seems that I’m torn between my love for the online, the free medium with seemingly infinite possiblities, and my love for old-school print media.
I guess the bottom line is, if we want to keep one industry going, we may have to jeopardize another. Maybe the future really will require users to simply pay for more of what they consume online or on our mobiles, regardless of how we wish it weren’t so. But only when all other avenues have been explored.
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Elizabeth
Media and Communications Student, Blogger. |
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