MONKEY BOWL FUN

Go here right now and listen to "Al Gore" by the band Monkey Bowl. Great fun.

SOURCE: Cyberjournalist.net.

10:12:40 AM    

CHANGING MEDIA

Bryan Keefer, the brains behind Spinsanity and one of the sharpest critics of political spin and media, has written an open letter to media that's a must-read for anyone who cares about journalism.

The piece, You call that news? I don't, is at the Washington Post web site (registration required). I'm going cite a couple of things Keefer wrote, but you really should read the whole thing.

To be blunt, the mainstream media don't give my generation what we want. We want the news and we want it now, of course -- we're spoiled that way. But more than anything, we want the entire story; not just the he said/she said, not just the latest factoid, but the truth.

...and...

To me and others raised in our media-saturated environment, where 24-hour cable news and Internet access bring us more information than we can possibly digest, the mainstream media seem trapped in the age of "All the President's Men." They're still wedded to outdated ambitions like getting the "scoop" or maintaining a veneer of objectivity, both of which are concepts that have been superseded by technology. We live in an era when PR pros have figured out how to bend the news cycle to their whims, and much of what's broadcast on the networks bears a striking resemblance to the commercials airing between segments. Like other twenty-somethings (I'm 26), I've been raised in an era when advertising invades every aspect of pop culture, and to me the information provided by mainstream news outlets too often feels like one more product, produced by politicians and publicists.

Keefer is writing as an information-obsessed, civically-engaged individual, which is probably not the norm for a lot of others of his age. But it's people like Keefer &mdash those engaged, involved, passionate individuals &mdash who should matter most to mainstream media. They &mdash not the celebrity-obsessed, gossip-driven readers that the focus groups keep turning up &mdash really are media's coal-mine canaries. Lose them, and you lose the reasons for doing anything substantial with this beast called journalism.

If mainstream media doesn't keep those readers (or viewers), if they are turned off by the failings of media (some of them built-in by blind and misguided worship of thought-killing standards such as objectivity) then it risks sliding further into irrelevancy and closer to extinction.

SOURCE: The always thought-provoking and entertaining Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine.com.
9:37:15 AM    

CONSIDERING NEW CAMERAS

The list of SLR-style digital cameras got longer this week, with new models joining Nikon, Canon, Olympus and the others with big pixel machines and interchangable lenses.

Both Konica Minolta and Pentax have rolled out new SLR-style digital cameras.

The Konica Mintola Maxxum 7D has a particularly interesting feature: anti-shake technology that compensates for camera-shake at low shutter speeds. The company claims it allows you to shoot at shutter speeds as much as three times longer than you could normally use when shooting handheld. Pentax's newest SLR has been downsized by about one-third making in smaller and lighter, a nice touch in a age when being a journalist increasingly means carrying around a sack full of electronic goodies.

No details on pricing and no reviews at Digital Photography Review yet, either. If these new cameras are rugged enough to stand up to daily use and their pricing comes in at a competitive level, their feature sets might make either worth a young journalist-to-be's consideration.

8:41:34 AM