InkTank

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.

InkLink! The iPhone NewsFuse App--killing Print Journalism 99 cents at a time. Read more here.

'Chuck' and the Future of Television

It's no secret that I'm a TV geek. (Evidence: here, here, here, here and here.) But even those who aren't narrative nerds who love to watch serials in expectation of the next big plot twist have plenty of reason to love Chuck.

For those who don't know Chuck, Chuck is the only quirky hour-long comedy about a Stanford flunky who works at a Geek Squad-style entity while solving top secret CIA investigations. Chuck is also unabashedly for the children of the '80s. Guest stars include Scott Bakula of Quantum Leap and Chevy Chase of the SNL and the Vacation franchise.

For those of you not obsessively following the story, Chuck was slated for the chopping block earlier this year. The niche television show faces the same conundrum that killed Arrested Development and has threatened both LOST and Gossip Girl--tons of web viewers, tons of iTunes downloads, low ratings in their broadcast slot.

What saved Chuck? Hint: Five Dollar, Foot-long. Yep, thanks to special sponsorship deal with Subway, Chuck will be getting another 13 episodes--not a full season, but hey it's still breathing. What could this sponsorship deal look like?

Tale of Two Cities: Cutting Buses

One of the things we emphasize at the Washington Journalism Center is the degree to which Washington, D.C. is two cities. There's Washington -- the home of government pomp and power that rides the metrorail from power center to power center; and there's DC -- the home of crime and generational poverty that rides the metrobuses from neighborhood to neighborhood.

And is there a cultural-racial divide? You'd better believe it:

» More than half of Metrobus riders are black, Latino or Asian/Pacific Islander. But only a quarter of Metrorail riders are such racial or ethnic minorities.

» Education levels vary, with 80 percent of rail riders having at least a college degree compared with 59 percent of Metrobus riders. Similarly, the median income of Metrorail riders is $102,110, while Metrobus riders earn a median $69,620 annually.

And do the two mix? Sometimes. And it's grand when it happens. But this divide is in the background of the brilliant story by the Washington Examiner last week. There's a budget shortfall in Metro and where were the suggested cuts? The bus system. Here's a breakdown on the proposed changes:

Review: Modern Arab Journalism by Noha Mellor

Noha Mellor’s book attempts to map the research gap of Arab Journalism. Through the course of the book, she notes empty areas of academic research: the social practices of Arab Journalists and the local/national Arab media as opposed to pan-Arab media. She also refuted the generalization of Arab media as a unified entity, viewing it instead as a diverse array of press models in a diverse culture.

Hybridity is a key concept in the understanding of this book. Hybridity is flows from the idea of globalization. When Arab countries encounter a force like McDonalds they don’t always (often?) react by forming a picture perfect western McDonalds. In hybridity, a culture forms their own style of fast food restaurant (Mellor 9-10). This is especially true in regards to journalism. Over the past two decades, increased western presence in Arab countries, along with the proliferation of cell phones and internet have given Arab countries unprecedented access to Western Journalism.

One of the key social practices adopted from the American model press is the idea of the objective reporter (Mellor 127). Acting as what Mellor, calls a “truth investigator,” arab journalists in numerous countries go in search of a set of facts (Mellor 123). What is perhaps less adopted from the American Model press is the idea of quoting numerous sides of an issue to find the truth.  For example, Mellor notes that there are no arab news organization – at least none that she cites – that publish stories critical of Islam (Mellor 133). In this way, Arab Journalism is perhaps more easily identified with the openly-biased (by Western standards) style of the press used in European countires. But even there, the comparison still perhaps falls short. Numerous factors, such as the proliferation of Arab dialects used in news organizations, the medium and the country in question make Arab Journalism problematic to pin into a given slot of typology (Mellor 142-143; 91-92).

InkLink! Traditional television being pushed out of the picture. Read more here.

Radical Christian Terrorists?

This seems oddly familiar:

Religious right groups in Minnesota and across the country are enraged by a recent report by the Department of Homeland Security that they feel targets them as right-wing extremists and terrorists. The report was commissioned by the Bush administration but not finished until President Obama took office.

Maybe it's because it looks like this...

Is Bias Killing the Newspaper?

If only it were that easy. Jacoby addresses that question very well in his recent Op-Ed for the Boston Globe:

I wish the lack of ideological diversity that tends to characterize most major newspapers - the reflexive support for Democrats, the distaste for religion and the military, the cheerleading for liberal enthusiasms from gun control to gay marriage - really did explain the industry's present woes. Because then newspaper companies would know what it would take to recover: a reorienting of their editorial views from left to center-right and the recruitment of editors and writers with a more conservative outlook.

But if liberal media bias is the explanation, why are undeniably left-of-center papers like the Globe, The New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle attracting more readers than ever when visitors to their websites are taken into account? How does liberal bias explain the shutdown of Denver's more conservative Rocky Mountain News, but not the more liberal Denver Post? How does it explain the collapse of newspapers in lefty enclaves like Seattle and San Francisco? How does it explain why the great majority of Americans - 60 percent, according to a recent CBS/New York Times poll - get most of their news from TV?

Newspapers are in extremis not because of their political agenda, but because the world around them has been transformed.

Islam and the FBI

When it comes to matters of Islam, too often we hear about American press and foreign press coming out with divergent coverage. It's neat to see them come out on the same side for once. Here's the AP story which also appeared on FOXNews (but not on the other broadcast networks. Interesting):

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — Mohammad Qatanani's mosque was full of FBI agents the night before he was to find out if he would be deported. But even though the federal government was trying to link Qatanani to foreign extremists, the agents weren't there to keep an eye on him. They wanted to show their support for a Muslim leader they considered a valued ally for the relationships he helped forge between the FBI and Muslims in the wake of 9/11. Across the nation, such grass-roots relationships between Muslims and the federal government are in jeopardy. A coalition of Muslim groups is calling for Muslims to stop cooperating with the FBI — not on national security or safety issues but on community outreach.

Of course, the second paragraph begs the question: is there a link? Now in scenarios like this, I tend to fall on the "stop picking on religious folks" side, but this is the sort of story that comes across as one-sided because the government can't talk about their investigation. So instead, we have a story that is heavily slanted (and well written) on the side of Mohammad Qatanani, but lacks the opposing side. Because the government can't express their side. That said, I really think the AP reporter did everything the could here. They did note that this mosque had federal agents showing sort for the imam. And that's coverage that I think would have polished the American governments image a bit in the "Daily Times" of Pakistan: