In 1945, sociologist Bernard Berelson took advantage of a newspaper delivery strike in New York to do some research, later published as What ‘Missing The Newspaper’ Means.
With 500 Aussie journos on strike (see their website), I thought it might be instructive to revisit a few of Berelson’s observations, to see how they held up today. Continue reading
Proving perhaps, that you have to be American to send up the DNC, Brit comic John Oliver gets a mixed reception on the Daily Show — right at the end.
Over at the BBC, Nicola Meyrick steps up to defend Analysis from 7 August 2008, Al-Qaeda’s Enemy Within, against the claim from a document leaked to the Guardian that suggested the programme was inspired by a government information unit. Continue reading
Thanks to WW2, one of the moral talking points of the past century was the collective complicity of citizens and cultures.
In this century, the arguments over collective complicity will come less from our civic activities, than from our consumption and investment decisions.
What does all this have to do with the news business? Nothing and everything.
My holiday treat was Larry Sanders on the iPod. Among the many, many gems:
Larry: Do you know what the American Television Award looks like?
Artie: Well, it’s probably a statue of a guy with his head halfway up another guy’s ass.
This is my favourite quote from one of the books I’ve been reading over the vacation, Hans Christian von Baeyer’s Information: The New Language of Science:
Why does nature seem granular, discontinuous, quantized into discrete chunks like sand — instead of smooth and continuous like water?
The answer is that while we have no idea how the world is really arranged, and shouldn’t even ask, we do know that knowledge of the world is information; and since information is naturally quantized into bits, the world also appears quantized.
If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.