600 Pound Mom Goes to Paris – and other travel video no no’s
My father died on Christmas Eve, three years ago. Among the things he left behind was a lifelong collection of color slides. Â He had a 35mm Kodak camera he had picked up after WW2 and used it all his...
Read moreThe Price of Progress?
New technologies often have unintended consequences. People think that they can control new technologies, but in fact, once released, it is technologies that control people. Oddly enough. When the automobile was invented, it was clearly a much better way...
Read moreNewsweek – A Mass Extinction Begins
A rare fossil find. Proof it once walked the earth. There have been five mass extinctions in the history of the earth: Â The Permian, about 298 milion years ago, when 90% of all life on the planet was wiped...
Read moreThe Sound of Silence on Thanksgiving Day
When my father died a few years ago, I inhereted his massive collection of 35mm slides.From 1952 until the mid 1970s, he, like most people of that era, had recorded the significant events in our lives – trips, birthday...
Read moreHurricane Sandy – Why Is Local News So…..Predictable
I found this on YouTube and I like it. It’s a great parody of local TV news. It could be real. Yesterday, like all New Yorkers, we were glued to our TV sets watching local TV news coverage of...
Read moreClark Kent Quits Daily Planet – The Definitive End of Newspapers
Andrew Sullivan, over at The Daily Beast is reporting that iconic newspaper reporter Clark Kent (aka Superman) is quitting his gig at The Daily Planet newspaper to start his own blog. If this doesn’t mark the definitive end of...
Read moreWhat The Soon To Be Dead Newsweek Could Learn from HSN
On Friday I was down in Tampa trying to sell my book, iPhone Millionaire, on the Home Shopping Network. Yesterday, Newsweek announced that they were terminating the print version of the magazine. What do these two things have to do...
Read moreHow Twitter is Wrecking The Elections… and more, probably
In 1985, Neil Postman published what for me would be one of the seminal books I ever read: Amusing Ourselves To Death I sitll think it’s required reading for anyone who wants to understand the media. Postman’s thesis was...
Read moreThe Commitments – Or, Why Most Documentaries Suck
This morning I got an IM from an NYVS member. He’s also a student at a film school in the UK and now he has to make a small documentary film for his class. He wrote to ask some...
Read moreWhat Future for Journalism? An Open Letter To Lee Bollinger
Dear President Bollinger, Like many alumni of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, I read with interest of Dean Nicholas Lemann’s departure, and that you would be heading up the search for a replacement. Hence, my letter...
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