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How television made money
A brief account of how network bosses make money from Dan Lyons at Forbes, aka Fake Steve Jobs: What the fuck is a television network? It’s a system of affiliates designed to help carry a broadcast signal across the wide continent of America on airwaves and into television sets owned by millions of people. In…
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Chipwrapping
Martin Belam has been engaged in some online heavy lifting to create Chipwrapper. It’s a custom search that just returns results from major UK news sites. What’s to like? As Lloyd Shepherd points out, Martin has created something that wasn’t there before. To express it in genuinely clunky terms – it allies online distribution with…
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Two Americas
David Warsh’s Economic Principals is a thin blogospheric vein of gold. Much recommended. This week, he’s reviewing Daniel Aaron’s memoir The Americanist which concludes: “[I] find myself a citizen of two Americas. One of them is the country of Uncle Sam, an America, in the words of Herman Melville, intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless…
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Big Brother trouble
The ratings crunch hitting Big Brother has nothing to do with the entertainment possibilities of putting a group of young people in a house and filming them for TV. MTV started doing it back in 1992 with a show called the Real World, and they’re just casting its twentieth series. But MTV is a niche…