Author: Paul

Alt. Weeklies Suffer, ShutterThe Nose, of Portland, OR’s Willamette Week, notes that alternative weeklies are “running scared,” based upon his experiences at this year’s Association of Alternative Newsweeklies meeting in Madison, WI. Ad revenue is down and the pressure to mainstream and corporatize is strong. In a related note, Dayton, OH’s alternative weekly, the Impact…

USA Today does a quick survey of the state of music radio, giving brief, but fair play to it’s monotonous decline at the hands of strict formatting and moronic morning shows.

Per CNN:“Movie studios and consumer-electronics companies are close to reaching an agreement that would protect digital-television broadcasts from being copied and traded Napster-style over the Internet, negotiators said on Monday.” According to the article the copy protection method sounds similar to SCMS which is used to control direct-digital copying of music. In that system CDs…

Who’s Buttering Their Toast? Not you. —Reps. Billy Tauzin and Fred Upton are urging the repeal of the TV-Newspaper cross-ownership ban in a letter to the FCC. Previously: AFL-CIO Says Keep Ban on Cross-Ownership, 3/23/02 NPR Investigates Newspaper-TV Duopolies, 12/12/01

Jason Pitzl sent me a link to this Laura Flanders column on how Google apparently pulled ads placed by Body Shop founder Anita Roddick because she called John Malkovich a “a vomitous worm.” Google says that her site violated their editorial policy against ‘sites that advocate against groups or individuals.’ So does that mean the…

Oh yeah, givin’ the beat-down to the man: Look Out, Corporate America, Here Comes My Pirate Radio Station.” A six block radius that rocks the onion.

The Washington Post has a profile of the regional Clear Channel operation in the DC area. Sure, Clear Channel is losing money this year, but they’re still laying waste to the radio dial while they bleed. My prediction: either they’ll swallow a few more companies in different sectors of the entertainment business to bolster their…

The Electroinc Frontier Foundation put together a fun and informative Flash animation on the evils of Hollywood’s plot to coerce Congress into locking up all our intellectual property (via boingboing).

Couldn’t agree more: Alen Cox asks in the Media Guardian, “But who are the real pirates?” A hint — it’s not kids with camcorders.

Analyzing AOL/Time-Warner — Profits and “Success” Aren’t the Real Story The On-Line Journalism Review’s senior editor J.D. Lasica has written a fairly lengthy analysis of AOL/Time-Warner and its impact on journalism, especially for millions of people for whom the AOL start screen is their first welcome to the Internet every day. Lasica rightly points out…