Transforming Movie Profits

Sure seems like a lot of recent movies are based on toys, old TV shows, and other well-worn ideas. It turns out these ideas have considerable appeal to the studio because of the merchandise that can be sold around these familiar-looking movies. And increasingly, Hollywood is looking toward Wal-mart and other retailers as partners and profit centers for sales of Transformers, G.I. Joes and other toys that are suddenly movie stars.

Radio as Cultural Touchstone

Radio is a relatively simple and inexpensive mass medium, and it is pertty good at broadcasting information, ideas, voices and personalities across the airwaves. For Native Americans living on tribal lands, radio is a vital link, as this National Public Radio Story reports.

That's the Way It Was...

Your humble mass comm instructor began the week with a media note that paid tribute to the late, great CBS newsman Walter Cronkite. Part of the medianote was cultural literacy--explaining to young people what Mr. Cronkite's significance was in 20th Century American history--and part of it was a discussion of TV news and its future.

Big Game, Small Screen

Online games are a growing part of the media. Smart phones (iPhones in particular) are showing red-hot growth, even in the current economic downturn. So if you put the two together, then games on iPhones must really be an up and coming thing, right? Well, yes, according to this recent Yahoo! News article.

Friended by Mom

Facebook and other social networks are rewriting the rules of friendship and other types of human interactions. It's pretty much a rite of passage for teenagers to have a Facebook, MySpace or other account, complete with questionable photos and saucy comments. But what do you do, heaven forbid, if your mom wants to friend you?

Shooting War

Just what do those death-defying photojournalists add to the media's war coverage? Are they there to document and authenticate the stories? Are they there to put war in emotional context? Is their purpose simply to draw in readers and viewers? And have we reached a moment where the inevitable bystander with a cellphone camera can shoot and post pictures of a news scene before the professionals can even slip their press passes on?

The starting point for this conversation was a recent Los Angeles Times review of a documentary about the noted photojournalist Eddie Adams.

Point. Click. Read. Comment.

Book reading is generally a solitary activity. We curl up with a good book, usually alone. But the inevitable coming of ebooks is shaking up the old conventions of reading. Bookglutton.com turns reading into an online social activity, according to this National Public Radio story.