Now Produce from Anywhere and Everywhere
Skyping with Francisco in Ethiopia When I was a producer for CBS Sunday Morning (a million years ago), I lived on an airplane. If you wanted to produce TV shows, you had to go to the place they...
Read moreWho Killed William McKinley?
The news that rocked the nation It is only now 112 years since President WIlliam McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo New York, but the event still captures the imagination of all Americans. Was there a conspiracy? Was there a...
Read moreAttack of the Librarians
One way… Last week I wrote a blog about the future of physical libraries in an online and digital world. Can they survive? Is there a place for them? I also published it in The Huffington Post. I have...
Read moreThe Machine Gun and the Media
There is an old expression that goes ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. Ever hear it? Nothing could be further from the truth. In point of fact, the world works in exactly the opposite way. New inventions come along...
Read moreWhy TV News is SO VERY TERRIBLE (and why ratings keep dropping)
same old.. same old… When television was launched by David Sarnoff at the 1939 World’s Fair in NY, no one knew what to do with it. Think Internet 1992. But they knew what to do with radio. Radio was...
Read moreThe Library of Youtube
Yeah…lemme see American Idol from last week…. In 1988 I left my job as a producer at CBS News to go to Gaza with a small video camera and start shooting my own stories. I spent a month in...
Read moreMurdoch vs. Galileo
And that’s the way it is….. On August 25, 1609, four hundred years ago, Galileo Galilei demonstrated his telescope to Venetian lawmakers.  A few months later he would publish Siderius Nuncias, his support for the Copernican heliocentric theory –...
Read moreI Am Mister Ed
You never heard of a talking horse? I used to teach a course at NYU called “Television and the Information Explosion”. I didn’t invent the name of the course, I just inherited it. It was a stupid name, and...
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