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Who buys stuff from Sky Mall?

A recent look through Sky Mall magazine confirmed that there are things you see in Sky Mall that no one in the world owns. Or would buy, if given the choice. Some examples:

Voice Activated R2-D2-
"This motorized replica of the headstrong little "droid" from the iconic Star Wars films responds to over 40 voice commands, navigates rooms and hallways."

Buying a plastic one too cheap for you? Buy one that can creep out your friends. Thanksgiving dinner? Try the "launch lightsaber" command so you can carve the turkey a bit more cleanly.

The Pet Observation Porthole-
"This clear acrylic dome opens a window to the world that helps satisfy a pet's natural curiousity while maintaining safety and security."

Don't make your dog go through the trouble of looking under the fence! Now he can look through the porthole to see if the neighbors are cooking beef, have another dog over, are skinny-dipping, etc. If my neighbor had one of these, I might move.

What if Starbucks operated like an evangelical Megachurch?

Tmatt's Answer to the Struggling News Biz

The lede from WJC Director Terry Mattingly's column today:

WASHINGTON BUREAU: Terry Mattingly's religion column for 7/08/09.

Sex, sex, sex. That seemed to be the only thing United Methodists were
talking about the year that the Rev. James V. Heidinger II took
command at Good News, a national movement for his church's
evangelicals.

Chris Moody (WJC Fall '06)'s email response:

Tmatt's lede: Sex, sex, sex.

I believe that Tmatt may have unlocked the secret for saving the news media. Think about it...we might be on to something. This could be the Washington Post:

Clashes Subside as Troops Arrive in Chinese Region
URUMQI, China, July 8 -- Sex, sex, sex. The Chinese government blanketed this strife-torn city with 20,000 new security troops on Wednesday, as thousands of residents began to flee following the deadly ethnic clashes that erupted over the weekend.

Power of Stimulus Slow to Take Hold
WASHINGTON -- Sex, sex, sex. Five months after Congress approved a massive package of spending and tax cuts aimed at reviving an ailing economy, the jobless rate is still climbing and the White House is scrambling to reassure an anxious public that President Obama's prescription for economic recovery is on the right track.

The Role of Islam in Popular Media

Reviews: Essay, “Local Contexts of Islamism in Popular Media,” “Reporting Islam,” and “Muslims and the News Media.”

This post will be a review of the three different works I’ve sampled in the past two weeks. All of them are so interrelated that it makes sense to summarize them together.

“Local Contexts of Islamism in Popular Media”

In this essay, Lila Abu-Lughod talks about the degree to which Egyptian television serials in the past two decades have shaped Egyptian perceptions of Islamism, the piety movement. She notes that Egyptian television serials work differently from other nations. Egyptian serials run day-after-day for a maximum of 30 episodes and then they’re finished. And often these serials run through the nation’s religious authority, al-Azhar. She notes that in the early 90s, there were few depictions of Islam (or Islamism) in television serials.

“All that viewers could see were people for whom religion was taken for granted as part of their identity and that sometimes offered solace in times of personal trouble. Piety was seen only among the elderly” (Abu-Lughod 8).

Mary Poppins Techno

Because it's Tuesday and because it's summer and, well, just because:

Does Marriage Matter?

For those who've followed the breakdowns of the Sanfords, the Edwards, the Gosselins -- well, need I go on?--marriage may seem a bit bleak. TIME takes the issue straight on in a compelling piece sure to draw flack: "Why Marriage Matters." (Although it seems a bit odd to follow that with "Top 10 Mistresses!") In the piece, Caitlin Flanagan notes a connection between one-parent marriages and poverty, drugs, jail time, etc. According to Flanagan, growing up in a two-parent marriage creates a better environment for raising a family.

In response to TMI reports on the Sanford affair, Flanagan quotes Leonard Michaels:

"Adultery is not about sex or romance. Ultimately, it is about how little we mean to one another."

TV News this summer needs more...well, news

When it's slow news, count on TV news to make some news, ALOT of news. H/T Marcus Powers

I know I'm biased, but would it be wrong to suggest we stop covering dead celebrities and go back to covering, you know unrest in Iran, the auto/financial crisis?

Jon Stewart satired this very issue night before last with the "RIPpy Awards" for Obitutainment. Some hard-hitting reporting. See below:

InkLink! Marketing exec. calls scheduler by "Liz" rather than "Elizabeth." She unleashes all kinds of DC crazy. Reenactment here.

InkLink! YouTube opens it's "Reporter's Center." AFP story here.

Why is an advocacy organization writing for the Washington Post?

Apparently, this has been going on for at least the past week, but I only noticed it this morning. I was reading an article on "How a Loophole Benefits GE in Bank Rescue", and realized the byline was a bit odd. It was a double byline that looked like this:

By Jeff Gerth and Brady Dennis
ProPublica and Washington Post Staff Writer

On their website, the Washington Post explains the shared story:

About This Story This article was reported jointly with Jeff Gerth of ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. ProPublica is supported entirely by philanthropy and provides the articles it produces, free of charge, both through its own Web site and to leading news organizations.

What does it mean when an advocacy organization can write for the Washington Post? "Hey yeah, Woodward, we want you to do this investigative piece on theft of campaign documents. We're going to team you up with a journalist from the Heritage Foundation."

Why Twitter should not be confused with Journalism

@Woodward: Gas is Xpensive.
@Bernstein: 4 Real
@Woodward: OMFG! Prez is bugging some cribz!
@Bernstein: No Way! WTF?
@Woodward: 4 Real. Nixon is Rediculus!!!!! G2G. Lunch. Vietnamese. mmmm

H/T Monty Hobbs

What else can you do with Journalism?

Creative writing for one. Michael Connelly is a perfect example of this.

Connelly is 52 now, a big man with whitening hair who still seems most comfortable with his shirt untucked. It's easy to see him as the newsroom denizen he was for 14 years.

What's not as easy to see, beneath the extra-casual exterior, is the driven writer who from the very beginning saw journalism as a steppingstone.
...
[Eventually], with some trepidation, he told his parents that he was abandoning his two years of study in building-construction engineering to pursue what he knew was a 'long shot at best': writing crime fiction.

The reaction he got was 'one of the big surprises of my life,' Connelly says. It turned out his father had dreamed of being a painter. He'd gotten into the Art Institute of Philadelphia but had to shift gears to support his family. His only question was practical -- how do you prepare for a career like that? -- and he came up with the answer himself:

'Why don't you become a reporter and get a press pass?'

And Connelly is just one from a long list. Charles Dickens was a journalist. Mark Twain was a journalist. Ernest Hemingway was a journalist. More popular reference: Stephen King studied journalism in college and was editor of the college paper at the University of Maine. And if you want to look at the statistics, somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 percent of all published authors spent sometime in journalism. (The statistic is actually remarkably similar for screenwriting, but that's a post for another day).

The Washington Red Line Crash

It wouldn't seem right not say something about the metro crash here in DC. I'm not sure I can add much to the conversation, except to point out the obvious: sober looks on the metro, metro operators arguing about what went wrong, the metro headquarters bathed in black banners.

The Washington Post did a powerful feature worth your attention here.

But let me just give two of the strong human interest anecdotes included in the story, which profiled each of the nine dead:

Review: "The Arab Press"

For the basic themes of this book, read this, then subtract two decades.

That said, “The Arab Press” is the original study of press in the Arab world. Rugh notes in this book, which looks across sixteen Arab countries, that the press in the Arab world reflects and takes the shape of the country it’s in.

There is an intimate, organic relationship between the media institutions and society in the way those institutions are organized and controlled. Neither the institution nore the society in which it functions can be understood properly without reference to the other.

This is certainly true in the Arab world. The news media there, in fact, are particularly interesting in this regard because of the roles they have played during the third quarter of the twentieth century as most of the Arab countries gained their full independence and developed their own national institutions (Rugh xxvi).

The main thesis of Rugh’s book is that arab news organizations take the shape of, and reflect the country their in. It’s hard to generalize about Arab press because there are some countries with significantly freer press than others.

InkLink! How Twitter is providing the revolutionaries journalistic tools in Iran. Read more here.

Arlington: The Rap

This is why WJC students live in the District....

Why Sony wins the video game wars

Yes. I think Sony wins the video game wars. You will either find this statement (a) entirely credulous since I already sunk $600 into a 60GB Playstation 3 (personal bias revealed) or (b) entirely incredulous, because the Wii is clearly the fastest-selling system, and the XBox 360 has the most marketshare of next-generation games.

Let me start by saying that there is nothing wrong with either of the other two systems. But here are my reasons for this statement.

Review: The Press in the Arab Middle East

Press freedom was problematic in the Arab world for much of the 19th and 20th century. Press censorship wasn’t just legislated and economically motivated. Many times the harshest censor was the press itself.

Culturally, many Arabs saw freedom of expression as a weapon that could either be used beneficially or destructively. Rafiq- al-Maqdisi, a Syrian author, told the following story to illustrate it’s destructiveness:

It happened in 1908, following the restoration of the Ottoman constitution, in the Banyas district of the province of Ladhiqiyya. An angel walking from the town to the country met a villager on his way to Banyas, who asked him:
“What is new in town?”
“Freedom has been declared.”
“How come?”
“Our lord the Sultan has restored the constitution and imparted freedom.”
Whereupon the villager shouted at the top of his voice: “The world is free then!” and immediately grabbed a stick and started beating the angel for the world had become free! (Ayalon 132)

InkLink! Advice to Journalism students from "New Media Bytes." How to survive the decline--read more here.

"The Year the Media Died" to the tune of "American Pie"

InkLink! Alums making us proud: Shanley Knox (Spring 09)'s work at UPI here. Missouri couple (Ashley Gipson and Luke Reiter, Fall 08)'s blog here.

Why LOST still matters

Full disclosure: I'm a LOST nerd. No really, I'm that guy. The one who has all the crazy theories about the Island, who Jacob is, etc. I'm going to try to be objective about my appreciation for this show...actually I won't.

For those of you not similarly addicted, here's a brief summary (is that possible?) from Wikipedia:

 LOST is an American serial drama television series. It follows the lives of plane crash survivors on a mysterious tropical island, after a commercial passenger jet flying between Sydney, Australia and Los Angeles, United States crashes somewhere in the South Pacific. Each episode typically features a primary storyline on the island as well as a secondary storyline from another point in a character's life, though other time-related plot devices change this formula in later episodes. The pilot episode was first broadcast on September 22, 2004, and since then five full seasons have aired.

When ratings began to drift in season two and early season three and accusations flew that the writers didn't know where the show was going, ABC did something unprecedented. They allowed the writers to set an end date for a successful show.

Now LOST did shed some viewers in the process (in the five seasons, they've gone from 16 million viewers to 11 million). LOST is essentially a niche show on a broadcast channel, yet it has managed to be relatively successful both by critics and viewers. How has it done that? I have no clue. But I have some ideas about why the show still matters:

(1) The writers of LOST, unlike most other broadcast shows, have decided to reward obsessive compulsive viewers like me, while leaving causal viewers in the dust. Some studies have shown that though LOST doesn't have the best ratings during the broadcast hour, it does fabulous online. It's one of the highest recorded shows on DVR, frequently tops iTunes for downloads and tops hulu in views as well. So despite the moves other shows have taken to become more procedural on broadcast, LOST has maintained it's serial nature.

InkLink! Is the Christian "Photocopy the Culture" approach dead? Well some of it's publications are. Read more here.

InkLink! Play-by-play of the Obama speech in Cairo by an Arab Media scholar. Read more here.

Washington Times article on "Obama, bin Laden"

The Washington Times online product today carried this headline for Obama's visit to Saudi Arabia:

"Obama, bin Laden vie for public notice"

I'm not going to jump the gun and say media bias, but this is one they should have caught...

H/T Chris Moody

Undercover with the Evangelicals

Imagine this book: a student from an Ivy League institution goes undercover and spends a semester at a Jewish university to study the Jewish students there.

Imagine another book: a student from an Ivy League institution goes undercover at an Islamist university to study the Muslim students there.

Don't sound plausible do they? In my mind it even seems, well, kind of racist. Well, that's exactly what happened but at an evangelical Christian university (Liberty).

Taking a semester off to travel and focus on writing isn't that unusual for a student at Brown University. But instead of studying comparative literature in Europe, Kevin Roose decided to go to Lynchburg, Va., and enroll at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

I'm must admit my feelings on this subject are torn. In one sense, I feel like evangelicals are one of the few religious groups that it's socially "okay" to mock (this being an example of a chance to peek in on the "weird religious people"). But, I also have to applaud some of the results of his work. According to the article, Roose left Liberty with a much better understanding of evangelical Christians:

InkLink! Worst quarter in modern newspaper sales history. Read more here....Also, Church of Scientology banned from Wikipedia editing. Read here.

Batman: A Visual Analysis

Holy Sardines! How Batman has changed over the years! One of my colleagues at Georgetown did a digital media project in which he performed a content analysis on the covers of Batman comic books.

Here's the project. I know the text is hard to read, but this is the best resolution we've got.

H/T Gnovis Blog

Batman: A Visual Analysis from gnovis on Vimeo.

InkLink! Building a new News Corps. Some thoughts on rekindling the fire of American journalism. H/T Romenesko. Read here.