rejournalization

In a Web-based chat with Washington Post readers earlier this week, columnist Howard Kurtz shared the results of a recent Pew poll regarding the coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death:

In a Pew survey, 61 percent say the Anna Nicole saga is being overcovered, but 11 percent say they are following it very closely. Cable is catering to that 11 percent. (In fact, MSNBC has been covering the BREAKING NEWS of the latest court hearing pretty much continuously today.) In cable, you only need an extra half-million or million viewers to produce a serious spike in the ratings, and that’s why Anna Nicole, nearly two weeks after her death, is still sucking up plenty of cable oxygen.

Add: not everyone thinks the coverage is over-exposed, or even adequate. (Thanks, Sperk)

Categories: celebrity, news . Author: mist . Comments: No Comments .

Long before Dreamgirls the movie, there was Dreamgirls the award-winning Broadway musical from the early 80s which caused quite a storm of happy, singing lovin’ up and down the Great White Way. But there’s a big difference between DG-movie and DG-play. DG-movie has been seen by millions of people and as a film (and a popular one at that) it has a much larger reach that a silly play on the boards of some run-down community theatre will ever have.

Being that it’s no secret that Dreamgirls as a whole is inspired by and based loosely upon the story of The Supremes and once-popular recording label Motown, it doesn’t come as a shock that Motown has requested, and received, a disclaimer from the producers of the film that the movie is “a work of fiction and apologized for any confusion with the legendary record label.”

Could it be that Berry Gordy is looking for a slick way to get Motown back in the news by associating itself with one of the hottest award-winning movies of the year… and so close to the Academy Awards, where Dreamgirls is nominated for eight awards? Coincidence? Hrm.

Categories: film, music, theatre . Author: mist . Comments: No Comments .

Found via the Colbert Report, introducing MasterMedia’s prayer card. Your media personalities need your prayers.

Update: corrected link. Sorry about that.

Categories: celebrity, religion . Author: mist . Comments: No Comments .

(Via digg.)

Categories: gaming . Author: mist . Comments: No Comments .

RIAA and police in Atlanta raid an award-winning pair of D.J.s in Atlanta. Okay. Said DJs were hired by music label to create mixtape CDs. Okay. Labels ratted out DJs to RIAA causing the raid due to said mixtapes. Er, what?

Categories: music . Author: mist . Comments: No Comments .

DRM, or Digital Rights Management, is not well-understood by many lay people, despite the fact that they interact with DRM every day. Almost every time you pop a DVD into your DVD player, or CD into your CD player, or even listen to a track on iTunes, you’re interacting with DRM. How can one explain the problems of DRM to someone who doesn’t understand the technology and issues? Send them to Wired!

Categories: DRM . Author: mist . Comments: No Comments .

From Boing Boing comes the following. In 2006 the United Kingdom passed the Terrorism Act which, in part, made it illegal for people to glorify acts of terrorism in the UK. Enter Glorifying Terrorism, a collection of short stories out of the UK published in protest of said Act, and for the right of freedom of speech in the UK.

Categories: book . Author: mist . Comments: No Comments .

MMORPG.com is reporting that the Art Institute Online, of the famous Art Institute colleges, has formed an online community for students in Second Life. The community was built and designed for a Business Communications course the school has recently started teaching.

Categories: education, gaming . Author: mist . Comments: No Comments .

Slashdot is reporting that former Vice Presidential candidate and current presidential candidate John Edwards (D-NC) has set up shop in Linden Lab’s massively multiplayer game/virtual world Second Life:

thanks to a grass-roots effort, John Edwards has become the first presidential candidate to set-up-shop in Second Life. Jerimee Richir, whose avatar is called Jose Rote, paid-for and developed Edwards’ virtual headquarters, and, on a voluntary basis, is managing the in-world campaign

Second Life is inspired by Neal Stephenson’s prescient (in terms of virtual world building) Snow Crash, which presented a virtual world in which inhabitants can design their own content.

Categories: gaming, politics . Author: mist . Comments: No Comments .

Slashdot reports that the founder of open source Web encyclopedia Wikipedia is now setting his sights on the magazine realm with the creation of Wikia. Like Wikipedia, Wikia is an online open source magazine-style wiki wherein users can create new and edit existing content.

Categories: internet, magazine . Author: mist . Comments: No Comments .