Category: Uncategorized

I’m going to Chicago this afternoon, will probably visit Quimby’s again. If you click through that Quimby’s link, you’ll see I wrote about the zine bookmobile project. Those folks e-mailed me a few weeks ago and said they’re thinking of passing through Urbana, since apparently they’ve gotten a few requests. If you’re an Urbana-ite and…

Since I haven’t been able to get a good recording of the entire mediageek radio show for the last two weeks, here’s the news headlines as read on the program: headlines for 4-12-02 headlines for 4-19-02 I’ll have the features from the last two shows up for on-line listening this weekend.

Dow Jones reports that the FCC is appealing an appeals court ruling that the TV nationwide ownership cap is unconsitutional. The FCC argues that it has the right to limit how much of the national audience a single company’s TV stations may reach. The parent companies of three major networks — FOX’s News Corp., NBC’s…

Can the Mainstream Press Understand Indymedia? The Washington Post has a surprisingly fair and mostly accurate article on the Independent Media Center movement, with a focus on coverage of protests of the World Bank & IMF in Washington DC this weekend. Nonetheless, a certain amount of the author’s professional journalism bias comes through, as in…

Free.The.Media is having a live webcast tonight, called “Victory over Violence… Palestine, Israel, and Beyond. Free.The.Media is “a member supported autonomous network and cultural think tank whose purpose is to reclaim public space on the net and preserve free speech, privacy and access for all.” Looks interesting — I’ll try to remember to tune in.

This Austin-Statesman article details some more problems at community station KOOP, one stemming from a broken elevator in their building that the landlord doesn’t want to fix. KOOP is a pretty young station that seems to have been mired in difficulty, infighting and other problems since the start. This 1999 Texas Observer article lays out…

Michael Moore and the DIY Spirit Michael Moore was in town last night on his DIY-ish book tour for Stupid White Men and, of course, talked about how much trouble it was to get the book published in the first place, and how, then, his publisher refused to fund a real book tour (I believe…

Non-profit webcasters write in to Salon calling ‘bullshit’ on the proposed copyright fees going to the Recording Industry (not the artists, since they already get paid through ASCAP and BMI) and the RIAA’s pompous lies and defenses. I’ll let the absurdities and truth-telling speak for themselves. But I will say that it becomes clearer how…

In today’s Christian Science Monitor Professors John Nerone (who, incidentally, is my excellent academic advisor) and Kevin Barnhurst argue that the redesign of the Wall Street Journal is emblematic of newspapers’ shift to accurate user-friendliness at the expense of “empowering citizens by immersing them in a common news culture. In the industrial newspapers, readers made…

Point and Counter-Point on Pacifica In the newest edition of the Nation magazine Susan J. Douglas, a well-known communications scholar, asks, “Is There a Future for Pacifica?” In it she tries to take a middle-of-the-road approach apparently to objectively survey the prospects of the network as it tries to heal from its years-long conflict. That’s…