Future of Journalism

My minor was Journalism. My major was Psychology. If I had it to do over again, I might have reversed the two.

So it was no surprise I found myself agreeing along with Dan Gillmor in this Mediactive posting about how he’d reform the journalism colleges.

Mediactive article

Love of Culture

Today on TNR, Lawrence Lessig wrote a piece about Charles Guggenheim’s daughter trying to digitize a collection of his documentaries and putting them on DVD to distribute and the trouble she found when she tried to do it. Trouble that really should not have happened.

TNR article.

Self Service

I know I’ve talked about it before, but can’t recall if I have mentioned it on this site before, but I dislike self service checkouts at grocery stores.

Off the top of my head, Wal-Mart and Winn-Dixie are the only places I can think of that does this near here.

The way it works is there’s a bank of about six checkout lanes that are set up to where you scan your groceries or whatever and deposit them back in your basket. When you’re done scanning you select a payment method and throw dollars in the machine or scan a gift card or scan your credit card.

There’s one lone customer service person standing around in case you need help, like if you’re trying to buy beer or a film that’s rated R, they come over and press a few buttons on the machine to allow you to purchase it.

I was at Wal-Mart today and the place was packed, even more packed than it was during Christmas. It was crazy. As usual I picked out my items and stood in a check out lane that had a real, live, person checking out items.

I noticed that most people today got in the lines for the self checkout service. They didn’t go any faster than the normal method.

Most people today are too young to remember when we had Full Service gas stations. You pulled up to the pumps and a dude ran out and filled your car with gas, checked your oil, whatever.

Then one day they came out with Self Service. With this you could save 5 cent per gallon. Within a few years there was no more Full Service gas stations.

Needless to say, this put a lot of people out of work.

The time is coming where these self checkout machines will put a lot of people out of work. How will the economy bounce back is a whole group of people is put out of work due to this automation?

Oh, another thing, while self service gas started by offering a discount, what is the discount when you ring up and bag your own groceries?

There is none.

ACTA

Apparently this has been going on for quite some time. Several countries are readying to possibly ratify the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Act worldwide next month in Mexico.

ACTA affects not just counterfeiting, it makes things international law that were mentioned in the DMCA (and some things that weren’t). One of the pieces that I do not agree with (among others) is the Anti-Circumvention section which makes it illegal to bypass region code lockouts of DVDs (among other things). This means it would now be illegal for me to legally buy a DVD from Japan or Russia and then make it playable in the US either by ripping the video or via some other method.

Please go to the following site for more information:

Michael Geist’s site

Comcast Buys NBC?

I was met with the news that Comcast bought NBC when I arrived home from school. It always amazes me how the halls of education can be shielded from the “important facts of the day” but I digress.

If this merger would be allowed to happen it would result in fewer choices, higher prices, and less access.

I implore you to check out FreePress’s webpage in regards to this matter.

Free Press link.

Flyboys

The short review of this book would be “This book is awesome, if you even remotely like WWII related things, you will dig this book.”

The long review is thus:

After watching the film based on Mr. Bradley’s first book, “Flags of Our Fathers” and eventually reading the book, I knew I would seek out anything this man wrote. That was when I found Flyboys. I had purchased the book around the same time as I was reading Flags, but felt I could not read it immediately as I could only handle so many real war accounts in one go.

I made my way back to Flyboys a week ago and loved it, of course. I love Mr. Bradley’s writing style, how he handles the subject matter with grace and aplomb, never interjecting his own thoughts into the mix.

He could have written the whole book without talking to any Japanese soldiers, no one would have minded. But that’s not his way. He sought out and talked to people on all sides of the war. From the surviving pilots from the American side, the surviving members of the Japanese army and even the civilians affected by war: The family of those who went off to war and the people whose family were unfortunate victims of circumstance.

A few times throughout the book I came across passages that I could scarcely believe (if you read the book, you will not have any difficulty identifying them), but it’s all true.

My grandfather served in the Navy in WWII, he was stationed on a submarine chaser in the Pacific. I’ve been wanting to write a book about his ship for a long time. I hope that when it’s completed it’s seen as being as good as Mr. Bradley’s books.

Mr. Bradley’s website for Flyboys.

Book vs. Movie

It’s a fight that has been waged since film became a viable storytelling medium.

The book or the movie the book spawned (sometimes the opposite!) has been a war that has been waging for years.

A few weeks ago, I read the Russian book Night Watch. I told someone about it and found the films Night Watch and Day Watch (both are based on stories in the Night Watch novel).

We watched the films and over the course of several hours the differences between book and movie were enormous. At the end, my friend asked “You liked that book??” the tone of his voice made it clear that he disliked the film, just as I had.

I then tried to counter by telling him exactly what was different, that you can’t judge a book just by watching the movie based on it. In all, the film contained about 30% of the story from the novel and changed around a lot. Some of it good, others bad, mostly bad.

I did like a few of the scenes of the Dark vampire family, trying to live like normal people despite being outcasts in the human world and in the Other world.

I don’t want to say it was an unmitigated mess, but it’s one of the things where the film is the film and the book is the book. There is no comparison.

That said, I loved the book. I plan on getting the rest of the books in the series. It’s almost a “What if Harry Potter became an IT administrator and part-time Auror in Russia.”

Perfect Prosecutor

I’ve been a fan of the Ace Attorney series since it debuted in the US on the Nintendo DS (before this, it had been a Japanese-only GBA game). I have all four games in the series and totally love them.

This February, Capcom plans to bring out Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth. As can be gleaned from the title, you play as famed prosecutor, Miles Edgeworth.

I was hoping this game would be called Perfect Prosecutor, but I digress.

Capcom sent me a link to YouSendIt page that has a downloadable file of the first case in this game in flash format. While I have not had a chance to play it yet, rest assured that I will soon.

Link to the flash based game download

Makers

Cory Doctorow has a new book coming out soon, Makers. I’ve not reviewed any of Mr. Doctorow’s books here on this site (I wonder why?), but love the website he frequently writes for, BoingBoing (link at right).

Makers page.

Moral Panics

The argument posed in “Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars” by William Patry is familiar to those who have read the writings of Lawrence Lessig, Mark Helprin, Kembrew McLeod, and several other people whose works I have reviewed on this very blog.

Each one of those people listed above has a distinct view on the “copyright wars” – Lessig as a lawyer and professor, Helprin as a writer, and McLeod as a communications professor and “media prankster.”

What viewpoint does Patry bring to the table? He’s the Senior Copyright Counsel at Google, Inc. According to his disclaimer at the front of the book, he did not write this book to spread Google’s point of view, the words written in it are his own and have nothing to do with Google.

It touches on the same ground that each of those writers focus on before venturing into other territory such as Apple and Microsoft missing out on acquiring Overture, a company that paired search results with advertising. Yahoo! bought the company soon afterward.

Oxford University Press page for this book.

Official book blog